


Sunshine

by MomentumDeferred



Series: Of A Fractured Sky [3]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe - Biological Warfare, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Ecological Collapse, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Amputation, Brain Damage, Co-Dependency, Compound Fractures, Contains No Actual Lobotomies, Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Medical Procedures, Neurological Disorders, Panic Attacks, Platonic Relationships, Pneumonia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Speech Disorders, Suicidal Thoughts, Survival, Terminal Illnesses, Violence, feral!Matt, scavenging
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-04-06 10:07:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 30
Words: 302,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4217547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MomentumDeferred/pseuds/MomentumDeferred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how it is: the world goes down the toilet, aliens start dropping from the sky, and the oceans die all at once.  Everything is poison and the poison is everywhere.  What's left is nothing but echoes in the dust.</p><p>Despite all that, there they were—a co-dependent ex-lawyer-slash-doctor, a woman who cut out her own emotions with a knife instead of having to feel them, and a blind lobotomized ninja who couldn't put a sentence together to save his life. </p><p>Family is what you make it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. who will save you now

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Promyk słońca](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6519298) by [Marionetka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marionetka/pseuds/Marionetka)



Foggy woke up to a face drooling against his neck and too many blankets weighing him down. He lifted his head, blinking in the musty darkness of the apartment, and sighed. Not morning yet. Not time to leave. He readjusted with a soft sigh, tugging the balled-up form in his arms a little closer.

Matt snorted and clung to Foggy's shirt.

He resisted rolling his eyes, deciding instead to close them again. Maybe he could sleep another hour or so, before the sun came up and he'd be forced out of their cocoon. He listened to the sounds around them, trying—as he usually did on quiet mornings like this one—to hear things before Matt did. It was usually impossible.

But Matt was very exhausted and _very_ asleep. So it was a good time to practice.

The world hummed outside their apartment. Wind, dry and warm, blowing against the boarded windows. The bent flagpole next door tapping a staccato rhythm. No birds, no animals. No cars, no people. Normal. He never thought he'd get used to a world so silent.

There—from far off, a rattling echo. Gunshots. Too far to be a threat. Again, normal. He knew this from experience, and also because Matt would be up in milliseconds if anything sounded even minutely out of the ordinary. It was probably that group up north fighting over that store again, Foggy thought, boredly running his fingers over a scab on Matt's back. Still healing. A few more days and he wouldn't have to worry about infection anymore. Matt grumbled but didn't wake. He usually didn't after days like yesterday. Days where he limped back to their apartment, their island, with a heavy bag over one shoulder and an exhausted, triumphant grin on his face.

' _I got you something_ ,' he would say, like he'd stumbled on a funny bumper sticker at the grocery, instead of a cache of food and water he'd fought tooth and nail for. And might have lost a few teeth and nails for. (Not this time, though. Just his usual cuts, bruises, and lower left rib that he couldn't get to heal because he kept fucking it up before it got a chance to get better.)

Thinking about it made Foggy think about food, and thinking about food made his stomach perk up, twist, and growl. He winced at the sound, tried late to hide it with a sigh, and then rolled his eyes, because he knew exactly what was going to come next. _No, no, no, go back to sleep, you cranky asshat_. He went still and didn't move.

Matt shifted anyway. _Fuck_. He huffed, pressed his face against Foggy's neck, and grumbled. "Eat." Damn that man's hearing.

"I'm too busy being your pillow, Matty."

The curled up ball of a human carefully unfolded himself and pushed Foggy out of the blankets. "Eat," he repeated, clearly trying to put a 'don't mess with me' edge in his voice, but he was half-asleep, so it turned out to be about as sharp as melted butter. _Mmm, butter._

"Ugh. Slave driver. You want anything?" Foggy asked, rubbing the back of his neck as he straightened up to his feet. Sleeping on the floor sucked. He frowned at his skin flaking under his hand, then frowned further at Matt's lack of a reply. "Matt."

"Huh? No." It was hard to believe there was a human being under that mess of fabric. "You eat. I'm gonna...stay here." The words trailed off; Matt was asleep before he'd even finished his sentence.

Foggy wiped his hand off on his pants and sighed, leaving Matt to it. He wasn't sure how many times, now, he'd watched his friend push himself to the edge of exhaustion, then blow a raspberry at his own human limitations and keep going anyway. But when Matt needed sleep, he _needed_ it, and Foggy found it a very important job to make sure nothing woke him up.

Light was beginning to seep in through the boarded windows, and a gentle breeze followed after. It smelled like gasoline and rotted meat. Foggy, of course, ignored that, meandering slowly to what was left of the kitchen. The island and the sink, the tables and chairs were all long-gone. It was mostly a pile of boxes now.

Foggy found the duffel bag sitting next to them, and inched the zipper open carefully, willing it in his mind to stay silent. Fruit cocktail, fuck yes. He snatched it like it was the last one on earth before digging out a spoon and straightening up. Something twinged in his leg and back and he ignored it as he made his way across the room and up to the roof. He crept along, staying as quiet as he could, casting glances at the pile of fabric and blankets on the floor to make sure there wasn't any stirring. It hadn't moved by the time he was at the top of the stairs. Victory.

He inched the door to the roof open a bit at a time to avoid the creak it tended to make, and slipped out slowly, clinging to his breakfast. The sun was just beginning to come up over the city. Well, what was still there. The skyscrapers were gone, worn down to nubs, and most of everything else looked like a pile of dirt. Probably was. They didn't go into the city anymore.

A thin ribbon of smoke rose from the north, taking silently to the sky. It was the only thing that he could see moving. Caused by or the cause of the gunshots, he thought, as he unfolded the lawn chair and sat down. He popped open the can of fruit and took a bite, surveying the area.

No buildings to his right or behind him. They'd been flattened in the first few days. There were only a staggered few on the other side, half of a bar and most of an apartment complex. He still couldn't see the road. Too many cars, too much debris. Their area—their _territory_ , Matt would say with that frightening growl—was mostly flat except for their apartment. Even the billboard next door was gone, lost to the dust and dead vegetation below.

Foggy dug around in the can for the cherry. There were two. Fucking _score_.

He watched the cloudless sky turn slowly from grey to blue—well, he wasn't sure he could call it blue anymore. More of a greyish green. The Hudson, which he could just barely see, was black. Tainted. They couldn't even touch the water anymore. They couldn't touch anything that came from the river, or the ocean, or up from below the city, unless he wanted to shit himself for three days and then die.

He was scraping the can for the last bits, eager to get to the syrup, when he heard footsteps behind him. He only had to listen for half a second before he knew who it was. Hell, he'd known those footsteps since before the world cracked in half. One less thing that Matt had to teach him, at least.

"You're supposed to be asleep," Foggy called, not looking behind him.

Matt grunted, then came into his line of view. His hair was plastered to one side of his face, but his expression was alert. Intense in a way that Foggy knew _not_ to fuck with. Their rifle was also in his hand, a big black one with a scope, which really told Foggy everything he needed to know. "Three of them," Matt said, and held out the rifle.

Foggy dropped the can immediately, cursing, snatching the gun from Matt's hands. "Shit, seriously? Where?" He grabbed the folding chair.

"Mm." Matt tilted his head, and Foggy watched carefully for direction. "That way." He pointed down the street. "About...two-hundred feet."

Setting the chair down, Foggy knelt, resting the gun on top. He adjusted the scope, gazing down it, breathing carefully in the way Matt had taught him. Matt had certainly taught him a lot. He'd be under that dust below them if it wasn't for him.

"They're moving," Matt said, in that half-dazed tone he'd get when he was really concentrating. Foggy hung on every word. Him finishing his cocktail—and living, yeah, he _guessed_ that was an important one—depended on it. "Left."

He guided the gun left, but couldn't see them. Couldn't even hear them. That was probably why they and what they brought killed most of the fucking population. Foggy licked his lips, chapped and dry, like the rest of his mouth. He never got used to this. He didn't think Matt had, either. Seeing his friend standing, gaunt and wiry, with the wrecked sky behind him and a huge fucking gun in his hands wasn't an image he ever thought he'd find mundane.

"Ah, there. Behind the old store." He heard the smile enter Matt's words, and then quickly leave. "Trying to sneak up on us."

"They haven't got your ears," Foggy said, not disguising the pride in his voice, brushing his finger over the trigger. There they were, moving in that strange, sideways manner. "Speaking of. Cover 'em."

Matt stuck his fingers in his ears. Foggy fired, pulled back the bolt, fired, pulled back the bolt, fired again. Missed on the third shot, but he corrected himself, took a deep breath and hit the third one. The gunfire barked across the street, down through the skeletons of buildings, out across the blackened Hudson, then came back with weakening echoes. "Got 'em. Are they dead?"

Matt stepped up onto the edge of the roof, head tilted, listening. A year or two ago, Foggy might have feared for his friend's life, being so close to the edge like that. Now, not so much. Matt had better balance than the wasted rock of a planet they were still somehow living on.

It took a few moments for the information to be confirmed. Matt let out a long breath. "Yeah. They're dead."

"Assholes," Foggy mumbled, clicking the gun's safety back on. "How many this week?"

"Twelve." It was a staggering number. "They smell the food."

"The fruit, or _us_?"

Matt shrugged with a jolt of a smile. Foggy watched him move easily along the edge, never missing a step, before hopping lightly down next to him. He was still too thin. There wasn't anything left of him but muscle and tightly coiled sinew, skin that was scarred from too many near-misses and too dark from the burning sun. His hair was still growing back where it'd been shorn hastily off the side of his head—in a rush to find a splinter of shrapnel that Foggy was _so sure_ had gone right into his friend's brain. (It had actually skipped along the occipital bone because Matt was the luckiest motherfucker on the planet and ended up under the skin at the back of his neck. So more hair was cut off there, too. Matt had complained.)

"Stop staring," Matt said, flashing another smile. "You look the same as I do, Fog."

"Yeah, but you don't have to _look_ at me. I gotta see your skinny ass all day and night. Sue me."

"I would, but I sort of lost my license."

Foggy shouldered the rifle, scoffing. "That's your excuse, now? I thought you said the aliens ate it?" The door squeaked as it opened. "Was that before or after you dropped it in the acid?"

"The Hudson isn't acid, Foggy."

"Yeah, I'll believe that when I can drink it."

"You couldn't even drink out of it _before_ all this, come on." Matt got down the stairs first, carrying himself gently, favoring one leg. Foggy couldn't remember if it was an ankle sprain or twisted knee. He found himself worried about the fact that there were so many injuries he couldn't remember a specific one.

"What, you never went swimming in the Hudson before?"

"Not intentionally." Matt bent over the duffel bag in the kitchen and dug out a can of something, frowning before handing it out.

Foggy took it and read it out loud without blinking. "Potatoes. Do you even know how to swim?" He handed the can back.

Matt replaced it with another. "Of course I know how to swim."

"Creamed corn. How do you tell which way is up?"

"Direction. Pressure. I told you."

"Vegetable medley. What if it's raining?"

Matt had the can pulled open before Foggy had finished reading the label, digging into it with the same spoon Foggy had used. "I haven't seen it rain in a long time." He talked with his mouth full, which gave away the fact that he actually had been starving.

" _Seen_ it? Really?"

"Fuck. You know what I mean."

"Language, Murdock."

Matt gave him his trademark unfocused glare and continued stuffing his face.

\---

"I'm going back out," Matt said, while pawing through his backpack to make sure everything was still in there. Water, yes. Whistle, yes. Flare gun, yes. Extra knife, of course. He had four of them.

"North," Foggy suggested, sliding more rounds into the rifle's magazine. "There's a plume of smoke. Maybe someone died."

"What a horrible thing to say." It really wasn't, not anymore. "I'll go take a look."

"A _listen_ ," Foggy corrected.

Matt rolled his eyes. It was weird he could still do that when they didn't work. It was weirder how effective it was. "I'll bring you back a souvenir."

"No bumper stickers this time!"

Foggy listened to him climb the stairs, move out to the roof, and slip out of his range of hearing. He kept an eye out the slats in the boarded window, though, watching for the flare gun.

\---

It was four hours later when there was a monumental crash from upstairs, and Foggy dropped his carefully-loaded rifle magazine in shock, sending bullets skipping all over the floor. It took him two seconds to realize what was going on, three more to grab their first aid kit, and four more to get up the stairs to the side of his friend, who had staggered face first into the roof access door and dropped like a pile of rocks on the wooden walkway.

"Couldn't give me a hint you were here first? Prick."

Matt panted, bleeding from twenty different places. Empty-handed, Foggy noted. He didn't even have his backpack. Great. Matt opened his mouth and immediately started bitching. "Ow. Is now the time? My arm _really_ hurts."

"It's always the ti—what the fuck, is that a fucking _arrow?!"_

"Oh, is that what it is?" Matt reached up to feel it, apparently only just then noticing it had _gone through his shoulder and out the other side_. "I thought it was a straw."

"A str—Jesus, don't _touch it_ , what is the matter with you?"

"So, so many things," Matt said, then laughed, then passed out-mid laugh.

Foggy put him back together, like he always did. He kept the arrow, even though it had to be shorn into two pieces in order to be removed. It had red feathers on one end, and he ran his fingers over them, trying to think what kind of bird they came from as he watched Matt slowly come back to himself on the pile of blankets and clothes they considered a bed.

He watched Matt wince in pain, take stock of the situation, and roll his eyes.

"You couldn't have left me on the floor?"

"I just pulled a fucking arrow out of you."

"So?"

"' _So?!'_   Jesus, you're unappreciative today."

"It's gonna smell like my blood, Foggy."

"And you aren't used to that by now? I didn't even know a person could hold as much blood as you've decorated this place with over the years."

Matt pouted. He was very, very good at pouting. Especially when he'd been injured. It really was not fair. But then his face changed, and he pulled out the biggest gun he had— _genuineness._ It always made Foggy's stomach do weird things and he'd rather have those weird things be the result of expired food, _thanks so very much_. "You've gotten really good at this. Thank you."

Foggy just wanted to roll his eyes. "Yeah, yeah." He let out a fragmented sigh. "Where did you pick up that arrow?"

"From the sky," Matt said as an outward breath, as if it were the most obvious thing.

_Someday I'm going to punch this smug bastard right in his smug pretty face. Jesus._ "Matt," he said, tone warning. If his best friend was going to bring out his strongest weapon with that stupid thankful tone of voice, Foggy was going to respond in kind. No Murdock had ever resisted the 'boss-dad-Foggy' voice.

Matt winced at the tone. _100% accuracy._ "I was up north, like you suggested. It was quiet up there. Thought maybe there was salvage." 'Salvage' was their nice word for 'dead people that may or may not have supplies'. Because it was better than saying, 'dead people that may or may not have supplies and I looted their bodies for half a chocolate bar'.

"You didn't bring back anything, so I'm gonna assume no."

"I brought you back an arrow." He sounded super proud about that.

"Oh, thanks. I'll cherish it forever. I'm talking about your backpack, idiot."

"Shit. Yeah." Matt pawed at his face. "I dropped it."

Foggy, with great effort, had to wrestle his voice out of the timbre of 'pissy wife scream'. It ended up in between '50's housewife finding a mouse' and '90's housewife finding marijuana'. " _Dropped it?_   Where?!"

"Somewhere between here and there." At Foggy's frustrated groan, he followed up with, "Yeah, no, I think it was right after they shot me."

"Fantastic. Amazing. That was our only flare gun."

Matt waved a hand in the air. "I'll find another." Like it was so easy. Well, actually, it was. If he didn't have that skill to back him up, Foggy would have definitely punched him by now for losing his stuff.

"And your knives. What the hell, one of those was a present." Before Matt could spit out something sarcastic—because goddammit, when he was hurt or tired or hungry he always got _too_ defensive and his only defense _was_ sarcasm—Foggy tapped his foot on the floor. Just enough to throw off his friend's concentration and give him an extra second to finish his sentence for once. Foggy took potshots when he could get them. "And not for you. It was mine. I got it from my grandpa."

Matt's eyebrows tightened, and he licked his lips. Thrown off. "Really?" His voice was small. He actually felt bad about it. Awesome!

"No, you jackass, I'm just pissed you lost them."

The concerned look collapsed into a hazy, long-suffering glare at the ceiling. "I'll go find them, don't worry."

"Uh-uh. Not happening. I don't want to pull another arrow out of you." Matt made a face, one that Foggy thought was supposed to be mocking, but it was overtly hilarious because he didn't know how to do it correctly. He shifted a little, pressing a hand to the gauze on his shoulder.

"Stop touching it."

"Ugh. God." He stopped touching it. "Foggy. There's a whole group of people up there. Weren't too happy to find me skulking around their buildings." He shrugged, then realized too late that he had to use his shoulder to do it, and winced again. "Three men, at least four women. And a dog."

"Who the hell has a dog these days?"

"Well, obviously these guys."

"Did they have food?"

"They had something. Some kind of meat. I could smell it cooking."

"Well, that solves the 'dog' mystery."

"No, it doesn't, 'cause I solved it myself."

"How?"

"By being bitten by the dog." Matt lifted one bandaged arm. Oh, so that's what made his skin look like it had been momentarily shoved into a meat grinder.

"Why did it _bite you_?"

Matt pressed his lips into a thin line. "I might've tried breaking in."

" _Might've?!_   There's not a whole lot of grey area in that statement, Matt, I'm sorry." Foggy rubbed his face and decided to drop his upcoming tirade about how careful his friend had to start being. It never worked anyway. "How big was the dog?"

"Oh, _super_ big. I think it was a, uh...uh." He spun his hand in the air idly, trying to come up with a mental image he didn't have. "What's—what's the one that looks like it belongs in a junkyard?"

"That's like, half of all dog breeds, Matt."

"Yeah, that one."

Foggy rolled his eyes. "I have no idea how you can be such a smartass with all that blood on you."

"Maybe that's my _actual_ superpower."

Yep, his eyes were about to roll right out of his head. Crap, Matt needed those. Who would shoot the gun? "I'm giving you the worst look right now." He leaned back in the chair—one of the few things from Matt's apartment to survive _whatever the fuck this was—_ and continued playing with the arrow. He focused on the feathers and not the dark stain of blood below them.

"Most of the looks you give me—" Matt groaned, gritting his teeth and forcing out the last few words through them as he manhandled his own body into a sitting position, "—are like that." He crossed his legs and hunched over them.

Foggy spun the arrow in his fingers like he used to spin pens. "Lay down."

"Get bent. I need to pee."

A bewildered laugh bubbled up in his throat at the sight. Matt, Mr. 'Stay-Out-Of-My-Territory', shivering with pain, pale and half-drunk from blood loss, bent in half over himself and _still_ bitching.

Maybe before all this, they would have been walking on eggshells around each other, awkward and polite. Now they were too close, too entwined. There wasn't _time_ for that shit anymore.

It was the most intimate relationship Foggy had ever had. And they didn't even have sex. There had been kissing, but only once, and only because CPR was involved. It had tasted like pennies and regret.

Foggy stopped himself from rolling his eyes again—he'd probably strain the muscles somehow and go blind like the idiot slumped in front of him—and got to his feet, holding out a hand. Matt's face twisted into either a grin or a grimace, and he took it.

Goddamn, he'd lost weight. It was like picking up a suitcase that you thought was full but was actually empty. He nearly tugged Matt into an impromptu tango this time.

"Jesus. You weigh like, ten pounds."

"Yeah, I have a really good workout routine." Matt steadied himself on Foggy's shoulder with one hand, then patted it and pushed away, toward the bathroom. Well, _kind of_ a bathroom. The actual definition of 'bathroom' probably included running water. That'd been gone for about as long as the rain had.

"I think that's mostly the diet."

"Man, do you think I could make millions off of it?" Matt shut the door in Foggy's face and continued to talk through it as he shuffled around. "...I need to drink more water. That or I got punched in a kidney without knowing it."

"I'm not looking at the color of your piss, Matt." Even though he had, and would, and even though he'd bitch about it, he'd still worry.

Somebody had to.

\---

Night fell, uneventful, and they retired to the pile for sleep. Foggy settled in first and Matt quickly wormed his way under the blankets, grunting in pain, and then pushed up and settled against his friend's chest.

It was too cold at night to bother about the logistics or worry about awkwardness. This was a sleeping arrangement borne by necessity and nothing else—that's what Foggy told himself. Well, it was mostly true. Sleeping next to Matt, his lifeline, his protector, listening to him breathe and feeling him warm and alive against his chest was the most important bit. He really liked that part.

But he always slept with a typical fitfulness, waking up four or five times to assure himself Matt was still there and still okay. Matt just kept drooling on his neck. Asshole. Foggy tugged him closer anyway, and Matt did that thing where he grabbed a bit of Foggy's shirt, pulled himself close, and _relaxed_. Like it was the only place he felt safe. There was something about it that made Foggy's chest feel tingly and warm and _nope not going there_.

He fell into an uncomfortable half-doze. Memories took him.

_His phone was ringing. Uptown funk you up, uptown funk you up. He picked it up on the fourth ring, juggling a beer and leftover Thai._

_"What's up, buddy?"_

_"Grab as much water as you can and get to my apartment."_

_Startled laughter. "Matt? You okay, dude?"_

_"Now. You need to come now." Click. Call completed._

_The sky ripped open and fire poured out while he was climbing the stairs to the sixth floor._

He opened his eyes. Daylight was lingering at the corners of the windows. Matt was still there, impossibly closer, face pushed all the way up against Foggy's neck. There was a damp warmth against his skin, and he jerked back immediately, expecting to find blood.

No. Tears again. Matt shuddered, half-asleep, and wiggled closer.

"Please don't let me go," he breathed, still halfway in a dream. Foggy couldn't tell what it was about. There were a lot of them. "I can't be alone." His voice was small and afraid.

Foggy leaned closer, and replied softly into Matt's tangled, dirty hair. "I'm never gonna leave you."

His friend shuddered again, the force of it jostling them both, then sobbed under his breath, and slipped back under the dark water-wake of sleep. An hour later, he awoke with a gentle startle, lifted his head, rubbed his eyes and climbed out of the blankets.

Neither of them brought it up later.

Another day. Rinse and repeat.

\---

There were rules.

_1.) Matt does not get to go out when he has any sort of open wound, head trauma, or internal hemorrhaging._

_2.) Absolutely no hogging of the covers._

_3.) The safe word is 'pepperoni', and that's what you say if you get in trouble and need to use a code. Shut up, Matt, like you'd be able to say avocado without laughing, you have to take this shit seriously._

_4.) MATT DOES NOT GET TO GO OUT WHEN HE HAS ANY SORT OF OPEN WOUND, HEAD TRAUMA, OR INTERNAL HEMORRHAGING._

_5.) Wipe your feet._

_6.) Compliment the cook._

_7.) Foggy, you only made this list so you would have something to punish me with._

_8.) Shut the fuck up, Matt, what do you know._

\---

Matt was not good at following the rules.

"Hey. _Hey!_ Where the hell do you think you're going?"

"I want my backpack."

"Fuck that. Sit down. I'll get you a new one." Foggy gave him a glare. He didn't even care if Matt couldn't see it. He'd stopped caring right around the time when he'd spent an hour digging shrapnel out of the guy's neck. "Until you've got scabs, you're staying right there. Look, I'll even give you the chair."

"I don't like the chair."

"What are you, twelve? Sit down."

And there was the pouting again. Class-A, antibiotic free, pure organic pouting. Soon to be upgraded to moping, and then maybe a little brooding if they had enough time before dinner.

Foggy grabbed a can of chili and shoved it into Matt's hands. "And eat this."

"Not hungry."

Matthew Murdock: the world's biggest baby that could also break your neck in four separate places.

Franklin Nelson: the world's biggest, bitchiest, most aggressive mother hen.

"God, get over yourself. Eat it."

Matthew Murdock: owner of the patented Matt Glare that had sent at least three hundred people running for their lives.

Franklin Nelson: completely immune to the Matt Glare because he knew Matt was fucking blind and every stink-eye he made might as well have been a red carpet spotlight waving wildly into empty air.

"Fine. I'll eat it if you eat too."

"Deal."

"Not the fruit. I want a fruit."

"Sounds fair. No scurvy for you."

"Case closed. Give me a spoon."

Matthew Murdock: attorney-at-law.

Franklin Nelson: attorney-at-law.

\---

The two days that Foggy managed to keep Matt pinned inside the apartment were total hell. He never knew _anyone_ who could bitch as much as his best friend when he was—reasonably, dammit—kept in one spot.

"You think if you're annoying enough, I'll let you leave?"

"Yes," Matt replied, serious as ever, throwing another crumpled sheet of paper at Foggy's head. He'd gone through two _People_ magazines and half of a _Hustler_. Foggy did not tell him that he was throwing a _Hustler_.

On the morning of the third day, Matt opened his mouth to complain the second he woke up, and before he could get a word out, Foggy shoved him out of the blankets. He wanted to hear Matt roll across the floorboards with indignant noises, but the asshole's reflexes picked him up like magic and set him gently down in a partial crouch. Foggy let out a loud, extended, agonizing groan.

"Oh, my _God_.  I can hear the bitchface cooking in your head.  Just get the hell out of here. I'm going to die if I have to listen to you another day."

Matt got one of those insanely shit-eating grins and ruffled Foggy's hair as he left.

\---

He was back in two hours, unscathed, that stupid grin still on his face.

"I got you something."

Foggy was taking inventory. They were running out of toilet paper again.

Matt clomped right over and dropped a plastic bag on top of Foggy's list. Foggy didn't tell him it was writing on a page from the _Hustler_.

"Thanks, dick, I was doing something with that."

"Look inside."

That grin was totally infectious. More than the plague or whatever the fuck had spread around the same time as the aliens showed up. Even scratched-up, gaunt, unshaven and with his hair sticking out in a weird direction with its lopsided shave, Matt's face still lit up like a kid's with that stupid smile. It was, alongside genuineness, one of the few things that pierced Foggy's defenses and did that gross chest-warmth thing. Ugh, get it away.

Foggy lifted the edge of the plastic bag with his pen, cautiously.

"What? You found _batteries?!_ "

Matt nodded. Kept grinning. Ridiculously beautiful in the filthy light of the apartment. Really not fair.

"Jesus, Matt. Where'd you get them?"

"Does that matter?"

"Well, if there's more where they came from...?"

"No, that's all I could find." The grin got wider. Matt's face was gonna fall off and it was gonna be gross. "Here, I got you this, too."

He reached behind him and drew a knife. Anyone else might have been scared shitless at the sight of crazy-slash-dead-eyes Matt with a knife in his hand. Foggy just raised his eyebrows. It was huge, with a serration on one side and sick, sharp curve on the other, last owned either by a hunter or _the most hardcore emo that ever lived._

"Wow, nice."

Matt handed it out gently, handle first. "Happy birthday."

"Oh, it's what I always wanted. A blind man holding a really, really big knife." Foggy took it from him, turning it over, watching the light wander over the blade. Jeez, Matt could probably kill an alien with it, if he hit the right spot. Also if anyone could get close enough to one without getting their arms torn off. "Finally, you remembered my birthday."

"Well, don't say I never got you anything," Matt huffed, and dropped into a sitting position on the floor, curling his legs up under himself and resting his elbows on his knees. He favored his shoulder, rolling it gently in its socket.

Foggy watched as he took the stockpile of batteries out of the bag, counting them. "How's it feeling?"

"Sore. I'm fine."

"Yeah, okay. I think if you ever said anything other than 'I'm fine', the world would end. Again. I swear, that shit is half your vocabulary."

"Well, it's true." Matt's eyes started roving around, near Foggy's chin, down toward the bag of batteries, up to the windows. Oh, yes, the 'Murdock-Is-Thinking-Of-Something-Really-Fucking-Dumb' look. Foggy waited patiently for him to start talking, which he did, eventually, and it was ridiculous. "I want to break into that place up north."

"No. You're an idiot."

Matt licked his lips, leaning forward. His eyes darted around. The 'Murdock-Is-Thinking-Of-Something-Really-Fucking-Dumb-And-Thinks-He-Can-Talk-Nelson-Into-It' look. "They have _food_ , Foggy. Stuff that's not from cans. _Fresh food_."

"So? We're fine with what we have."

"Cans of carrots and fruit cocktail aren't going to last forever, Fog."

"We also have the best bloodhound that ever existed. You'll find something. You always do." He leaned forward, and started talking with his 'Shut-The-Fuck-Up-Murdock-You-Have-The-Worst-Ideas-Ever' voice. "They _shot_ you. They actually managed to get an arrow _through your shoulder_. You're gonna go out there, dig around, and you won't be able to limp back next time."

"I'll be okay—"

"Yeah, if you die, you won't give a shit, 'cause you'll be dead! What about _me?_ You think I can make it out here, without you?"

"Yes," Matt said, voice small, trying to look in the direction of Foggy's face. Nope, Murdock, that was the window, try again. "I do."

Foggy let out a heavy, warm breath, and leaned his head back on the chair. It was a topic of conversation he wasn't comfortable with: what he would do if Matt went out one day and got himself fucking dead. "No, I can't, and I'm not going to." The words never got easier to say, out loud. In his head, he was screaming, _I might be alive, but you won't be here, and I can't do this by myself, just like you. I can't do this without my buddy._ "Drop it, Matt, you aren't going out there."

Matt's eyes finally found Foggy's face, but didn't linger, because they didn't know they were there in the first place. "You could come with me."

Well, that was a totally different can of worms altogether, being invited to go. The problem was that Matt was a difficult guy to keep up with, the way he jumped around on the ruined buildings and slipped under debris and moved through the city as if it wasn't destroyed and he wasn't blind. He also tended to catch wind of some noise and scuttle off, leaving Foggy by himself, which was heartening because it told him Matt trusted him to be okay on his own, but also terrifying because _Matt trusted him to be okay on his own_. "I'm not going up there," he settled on after a minute, trying to say _'I will get killed up there'_ without actually saying it and making Matt worry.

"Okay. I think I'll go tomorrow."

"What—did I not just say you weren't going up there? This is a team, I have half of the votes. I should have more of the votes because I'm the one that pulls arrows out of your shoulders and metal out of your thick-ass skull. This is, at the very least, an impasse."

" _Food_ , Foggy."

"Did you go deaf in the last two minutes? No, Matt. No." Foggy gave him a look, then saw the one Matt wore on his own face. Groaned. "Oh, Jesus, not with the pouting again, god dammit, Murdock."

"I don't pout."

"Yes. You do. You do it very, very well and it's very, _very_ obnoxious." Oh, that made the pouting worse. They were going to graduate to moping in a minute. "Jesus, Matt, stop with the face before I punch it off of you."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course you don't! You can't _see it!_ "

Matt huffed, and crossed his arms, turning himself away. "I can't believe you aren't interested in fresh food, Fog."

"It's not that I'm not _interested_. It's the fact that you're gonna get yourself killed if you go up there again. If not killed, at least hurt. And I can't spend another three days with your big baby feelings because I have the audacity to keep you here to heal!"

Great. They'd skipped right over moping and landed straight in a big puddle of brooding. Matt scratched at his forehead, picked at his jeans a few seconds, then got to his feet with a sigh. "Fine," he said, quietly. "I'll stay."

Foggy had to brutally murder the urge to roll his eyes, groan again, and scream that he was so tired of Matt's shit. Instead, he leaned his head back on the chair, ignoring the sound of his friend climbing the stairs and going out on the roof. He didn't leave, which meant he was going to sit and stew in his feelings for a few hours. Foggy knew he'd come back, probably with an apology, and they'd start the cycle of injury-argue-brood all over again.

He put the bag of batteries on the floor and went back to work on his inventory list.

\---

Matt came back in two hours. An average amount of time. He moved down the stairs, silent, like a ghost, and took a seat on a cardboard box in the kitchen. Foggy took a glance. There weren't any tears, at least.

There wasn't any way around it. They were really, _really_ fucked up.

So Matt stayed on the box, picking at his fingers, silent, unable to come up with something to say. He wasn't good at this—screw that, he was downright awful at this. He had been since Foggy had met him a lifetime ago, in college. Growing up blind and orphaned, apparently, was the recipe for 'weird vigilante best friend that can't do feelings but is unerringly loyal and actually really kind-hearted stew'. _Mmm, stew._

"All right, you big baby, come over here."

Matt bent his head, chewing on his fingers. He resisted for an admirable thirteen seconds before getting to his feet and shuffling over.

"Sorry," he said, hesitating a bit before sitting down next to the chair. Close enough to be in the proximity of touching, distant enough to be really awkward.

Foggy immediately reached over and ruffled his stupid hair. "Don't apologize."

"I'm pretty fucked up, huh?"

"Yeah. I'm used to it."

"You shouldn't have to be."

"I shouldn't have to dig through a million tons of New York to eat, but here we are."

Matt shifted closer. Leaned his head on the side of the chair. He was so fucking weird sometimes. "You know, if you wanted, you could probably join those people up north. Since you aren't diseased or—"

"Yeah, let's go ahead and drop that topic right fucking now." He tried to keep the fury out of his words, and couldn't. "What, you think I'm going to drop everything after God-knows-how-long, leave you alone, just so I can _eat a steak_ with those assholes up in Bartertown?"

"I'm just saying it's an option."

"No, it's not an option, so stop putting it on the table, or I'll beat you with the table." Foggy hated, _absolutely loathed_ , when Matt kept giving him chances to get the fuck out. "You think I want to end up in the Thunderdome?"

Matt's eyebrows pushed together. His head tilted. "What?"

"Mad Max, man, you never heard of it?"

"No...is it a book?"

"A movie. Dear God. I can't believe you don't know about it." Foggy got up from the chair, took a step to his right, and sat down on the floor next to his friend. He broke through that wall of awkwardness that his friend was so comfortable hiding behind with a practiced ease, gripping his unhurt shoulder. Matt didn't bristle, which was a small victory in itself. "Some Australian guy goes around in a sweet car killing people. It's pretty awesome. _'Two men enter, one man leaves!'_ "

Matt chuckled, not a full laugh but at least it was something other than silent brooding. He leaned into Foggy's touch, comforted. "Sounds familiar, I think." He'd stopped chewing on his fingers. Another victory for team Nelson. "Oh, wait, is that with the guy...uh, that guy who was in that other movie..."

"The one where...?"

"The one you saw with me. There were aliens. Not cool ones like ours, really stupid ones. You kept calling them 'Bad Green CGI guys' and they melted under water. It sucked."

"Oh, yeah, that's the guy. Mel something."

"Gibson," Matt said. He had a terrific memory. "Tell me more about Mad Max." His voice was so earnest and hopeful that it hurt.

Foggy explained the story. He'd seen the movies a million times, and outlined them eagerly, talking through dinner and then for hours while they lay on their pile of bedding, his voice a low, constant murmur. He talked until Matt fell asleep on his chest, and then for a while longer, staring up at the arched ceiling of the apartment. His voice died into silence, and he kept looking up, for a long time, listening to his friend breathe evenly in sleep, before shutting his eyes and dreaming of deserts and roaring engines.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I will not take from you, and you will not owe._  
>  _I will protect you from the fire below._  
>  Les Friction
> 
> Shh--I know there are a lot of comments I never responded to down there. It just seems weird and kinda cheatery to answer them after so long. Just know I love them, and I love you for writing them. You guys are the best.


	2. kryptonite

"Come out with me today."

Foggy looked up from his can of spaghetti sauce—fuck it, it was soup now—and glared at Matt as he leaned over a box, toward him, a movement that was probably meant to be persuasive, but his hands were on the fake tits on the _Hustler_ page Foggy was writing their inventory on, and it became anything but.

Again, Foggy didn't tell him that it was a _Hustler_. He tucked the image away in his head to piss himself laughing about later, clearing his throat to keep any stray noises out of it. Matt was amazing sometimes.

"You know, the last time we went out together, you got shrapnel in your face. And I don't want something to happen to me and...you know. Trigger it." The image of a twisted, wild face fluttered in his mind's eye. "I can't carry you home again, man."

Matt's lips pressed into a straight, white line. "That hasn't happened for a few weeks."

"Yeah, that's why I'm worried. It's been a while."

"It's not a cycle, Foggy. I can't predict it. And I'll be very careful around any other vehicles I find on fire, I promise."

"I thought everything was on fire to you."

Matt's face did that thing where Foggy knew that if anyone else had said that particular set of words to him, someone would be getting their fingers broken. Foggy took great pride in being the only person who could fuck with Matt and get away with it. He was just so easy to rile up sometimes. It was like a terrible addiction.

And Matt was still leaning on the pin-up on the table, looking as emotionally constipated as ever. Foggy suddenly, intimately missed his camera phone. This would have been on Instagram for sure. He would have gotten _so many favorites_.

He would have made an account just for pictures of Matt. Unprofessional, yes. Hilarious, double yes. Karen would have gotten mad, but she would be subscribed, the deviant.

Foggy wondered where Karen was now.

"I don't actually _see fire_ ," Matt eventually said, defensive. "It's just a...mental image." Yeah, yeah, Foggy had heard it all before. Temperatures and pressures and whatever. Matt was the most dramatic person on the planet, Christ. "It's hard to explain. You know that." His voice was small, serious. He didn't realize Foggy was just screwing around. It happened sometimes. Bummer.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm fucking with you, Matty. Come on."

A second passed where Matt held that grumbly look on his face, but then he relaxed and grinned that stupid fucking grin of his. It made him look like a damn twelve year old and it was so incredibly absolutely unfair. He made that face, Foggy knew, whenever he learned that they were still friends, still brothers, still _whatever the fuck they'd become_ in the last two years—that he hadn't fucked it up yet and driven Foggy off.

Matt had been like that ever since they met in college. Twelve fucking years, and he still expected—and obviously prepared mentally for—people to walk out on him.

Huge bummer.

Foggy sighed, tilted the can of sauce back and finished it in two large gulps.

Matt stared at his chin. Offered that hopeful beam of a smile. His fingers fidgeted on top of the box. He was playing piano with the fakest boobs Foggy'd ever seen. It became painful to not burst out laughing.

"All right." It was a minor miracle that his voice didn't crack. "Let's go."

He got to his feet to get his shit together, but only because if he had to watch the image in front of him any longer, he might die. And that'd be leaving Matt alone, after all, and he'd promised not to do that.

\---

Foggy grunted as he tripped on a partially-buried car tire and nearly faceplanted onto either a human skull or a deflated soccer ball. He really wanted to be disgusted, but the energy for such a wasteful emotion no longer existed. It'd been diverted to more important things like _vigilance_ and _determination_ and _not shitting himself when Matt's blood was involved._

Matt was moving, confident and graceful, forty feet up and to the right, just barely visible. He slipped along the edges of buildings and signs like he was moving through a clear, flat street. If Foggy wasn't so focused on not acquiring a new boot made of something disgusting, he would have stared endlessly. It was mesmerizing, the way Matt moved. Like it was impossible for him to take a wrong step, like every single action had been written out eons ago and Matt was only a conduit.

He kept glancing up anyway, frowning in reflexive concern as Matt tightroped across a slumping streetlight, hopped fluidly to another building, and descended along a razor's edge of metal siding to street level. Matt was grinning, having the time of his life, the fearless little shit.

Foggy kept frowning to stop a smile from spreading across his face. He knew it didn't matter, that Matt couldn't see it. He could feel the pull in his muscles and that was enough. "You are such a show-off."

The grin holding onto Matt's face as he caught up to him in the street cracked Foggy's expression in half. "It's fun. I like it." Nothing more truthful had ever been said. He patted Foggy's shoulder. "Plus, I can hear better up there." Then he broke away again, like a kid catching sight of a candy bar, hopping up on a dumpster and then onto a crooked fire escape, disappearing over the edge of another roof.

Foggy's broken frown tried to repair itself and failed. Matt really _did_  love it, being out in his city, as trampled and formless as it was. Shit, it wasn't even a city anymore. Just rocks and bricks, dust and bones. There was nobody left to protect, nobody but Foggy, but Matt stayed anyway, re-mapping every fractured city block and memorizing what buildings still stood. Foggy had never seen such a clear definition of _home_ than what he got when he saw Matt run around what was left of Hell's Kitchen with that look on his face.

Matt's home was a physical thing.

Foggy knew that his own wasn't made of brick and mortar, but flesh and bone. Ugh, sappy. How did he come up with this shit? He could be so gross sometimes.

"Water leak," he hollered, to call attention to the fire hydrant that was bubbling some disgusting black sludge ahead of them.

"Saw it," Matt yelled back, a block away and barely audible. "Oh, sorry. Heard it!"

Foggy rolled his shoulder along with his eyes, adjusting the weight of the rifle. He had no idea what street they were on, or if it had been a street to begin with. The smell of dust and rot and that bitter, alien tang that the destruction left in its wake clogged his nose. It was a wonder Matt could smell anything beyond it. The sky above them was still cloudless, maybe a little bit greener. He wondered what blue looked like; it'd been so long since he'd seen it that he wasn't sure he remembered anymore.

There was a clatter to his right and he jumped, slowing his steps. Down an alley, between half of a wall and an overturned bus—something might have moved, but it might have been nothing at all. It definitely wasn't a bird or rat; he hadn't seen any and Matt hadn't heard any in over a year now.

He pulled the rifle from his shoulder. "Matt? You down there?"

Foggy wasn't sure how his friend could have gotten to the other side of the street without being seen, even though he was— _was,_ no matter how much Matt denied it _—_ a ninja. Either way, he didn't receive an answer.

That frown from earlier returned, and he reached into his pocket to fish out his whistle, keeping it held between his pinky and ring fingers as he returned his hand to the rifle stock. Great, probably an alien. Or something worse. He couldn't smell that odd tang, a scent halfway between car exhaust and an over-stretched rubber band. It was unique, and Matt could usually pick it up from blocks and blocks away.

The alley bottlenecked due to a crumbling brick wall, and he crouched underneath the twisted remains of a fire escape ladder to slip out to the other side. An open area, now, probably what used to be a street. He thought he recognized the standing edge of a building—41st? Somewhere near their old law office. Foggy kept himself out of the open, moving along the rest of the building that had bottlenecked the alleyway.

"Ma—"

He wasn't even halfway through the word before something hit him from behind, hard between the shoulder blades, dropping him straight to the ground, breathless.

His mind clicked over and whirred into overdrive, thoughts flicking in an out in milliseconds:

_Not Matt, Matt wouldn't hurt me._

_Blunt instrument, not a knife, I'd be bleeding._

_Quiet and sneaky. Not an alien._

_Oh, great._

Foggy rolled over, leaving the rifle on the ground, yanking the knife from the sheath at his side just in time to stop a long splinter of a stop sign pole from crushing his throat. A man towered over him, the mid-morning light throwing his gaunt features into sharp relief. Face twisted into a snarl, teeth missing, skin yellow and waxy from too little sun and too much radiation.

_Get on your feet get on your feet get on your feet_ , was the mantra whipping at about a hundred miles per hour through his head. He grunted and shoved the sign pole away from himself, using his strength, superior compared to the savage creature above him. Foggy was stronger—for more than one reason—but not nearly as quick. The man growled and lunged again, and Foggy had to lift a leg and kick the weapon away, then use his own weight as an accelerant to get himself on his side, then knees, then feet, before spinning around to face his assailant.

Matt had shown him how to hop up to his feet from a reclining position, but the bastard was quick and agile and had been doing it for decades. Foggy was panicked and had more muscle than speed. Matt was all reflexes and grace; Foggy just hit as hard as he could and hoped it worked.

It certainly didn't this time, as he leaned away from a singing arc of salvaged metal and gave the big freak a kick, causing it to stagger, but not trip. Foggy let out a breath and made to use the whistle. Too bad he'd dropped it in the dust with the rifle.

_The Thunderdome, Matty! Two men enter, one man leaves! Max cheats using a whistle! But he drops it and spends a fucking week picking it back up again!_

Foggy backpedaled instead of doing the stupid thing and diving for the whistle. Matt would hear him. He couldn't have gotten too far. Matt would hear him.

The brute with the stop sign spear (dark red, but not from paint) howled and darted forward, leaning heavily to one side, movements stilted and jerky but aggressive and _fucking fast_. They all were. Foggy tightened the grip on his knife to stop it from getting knocked from his hand as he blocked the next swing. The vibration shot up his arm with a lightning strike of pain, but he kept hold of the knife. It was paramount.

_(Hold it like this, Foggy. Your arm should aim it, not your wrist.)_

He thought he could block the next swing, too, but the dumb-looking fucker went with a strange angle, and Foggy couldn't compensate enough; the pole slammed hard just above his wrist, the shockwave of pain an aftershock of the last one, and his grip faltered, sending the knife to the ground.

_Fucking great fucking perfect this is exactly what I wanted to happen yes this is exactly as fucking planned._

Foggy cut his losses and made to flee.

_(Never feel bad for running, Fog. Your safety is more important than your pride.)_

Well, of course, that was the absolute worst decision to make—it wasn't his fault, it had worked before, god fucking dammit—because the other man closed the distance in about a quarter of a millisecond, striking out with the pole, throwing Foggy right back down to the ground again. A foot planted itself on its lower back.

_Then Master uses Max as a skateboard and it's really dumb!_

The guy above him started to laugh, that shrieking, crazed noise that didn't even sound happy, it sounded more like high and desperate sobbing. Trademark symptom of the 'get the fuck out, you are about to die' sort of problem that was infesting the city.

Foggy rolled over again. The man had his pole in both hands over his head, howling— _wow, Matt, they remind me of Tusken Raiders—what the hell are those?—Star Wars, man, Star Wars—_ before turning the pole vertical, aiming to crush his throat or ribcage or maybe just his skull, the latter of which would be ideal, because he didn't want to be half-alive for what would come after.

He didn't flinch, and that made him proud of himself, but the blow also didn't land, because all of a sudden there was Matt, Foggy's dust-covered, malnourished angel of Death. And _hoo boy_ , fantastic, he had that pale fury on his face, that dead look in his eyes, an animal snarl twisting his face into that of a stranger's. Shit.

_Shit, shit, shit, shit._ He should have realized. It'd been far too long since the last time this happened. _He had told him like a fucking hour ago that he was afraid this would happen! The stupid idiot just didn't know how to_ listen!

Matt slammed into the guy from behind with the force of a train, his own thundering growl making the one from earlier sound like a fucking newborn kitten. He got one hand under the guy's chin and the other _half in his fucking eye socket_ , ripping him back and throwing him down to the ground. His face was taut, white-hot rage tightening around his dead eyes. Foggy didn't know this man. Foggy didn't know this animal.

_"Not yours!"_ Matt roared, and his voice echoed back from the buildings like a gunshot. _"Mine!"_

The big fucker on the ground clearly didn't know of Matt—and Matt certainly had a reputation around these parts—because he swung again with the pole from where he'd been laid out flat on the ground. Matt leapt over it miles before it had hit him, then shot out one hand, grabbing it and tearing it from the other guy's grip. The movement was so graceful that it looked choreographed. He tossed it away—oh, good, he didn't even want to use a weapon, Matt was gonna have to hunt down another shirt again—

Matt grabbed a handful of the guy's hair, teeth bared in a wild, terrifying grin—feral, _feral—_ and slammed his head to the ground, then did it again, and again, and then about thirty million more times after that, until there wasn't much left but the hair still tangled in his fingers. By then he was panting hard, but the growl was there still, a quiet choir beneath his breathing. He continued bashing what remained of the guy's head, movements automatic, slowing, like it was involuntary.

Foggy spoke out loud as he climbed to his feet, voice raised carefully. "Jesus, man. Leave some for the aliens."

Then Matt's whole body twitched, a sharp shudder running through his spine, like Foggy's voice had switched something off in his head. He took a few deep breaths, head tilting around jerkily, before he realized that he was on the ground and stood. He gently untangled the hair from his fingers, his left hand jittering wildly, then let it drift off in the warm wind as he stood up. His breathing started to normalize. The untamed expression on his face melted away slowly, and he was Matt again.

Christ. It never got easier to look at.

His voice was strained to hell as he tilted his head in Foggy's direction. "He bite you? Scr—scratch?" He was still trying to figure out how words worked. But it was a very important question.

"No," was his answer, immediate. "I'm fine." He grunted and stepped forward, maneuvering carefully around the mutilated body. It looked like the poor bastard's head had _exploded_. Foggy didn't go anywhere near it.

Matt skittered back and away, his draining adrenaline—and something else—leaving a hole in himself that he filled with nerves and trembling and his eyes flicking around like crazy. He took deeper breaths. Clawing back to himself.

"It's okay. Just me." Foggy spoke calm and low. He didn't dare approach his friend right now. "You back with me, Matty?"

"Hn," Matt grunted. "Think so."

Foggy sighed and started forward to collect his gun.

He must have gotten too close, because Matt jolted with a high, strained whine, even though Foggy was giving him a very wide berth. "Don't—don't—don't touch me," Matt hissed, moving back few steps, eyes terrified. "Jesus, Foggy, you know better."

"Hey, hey, not gonna touch you. I'm getting my gun, man."

Matt let out a rattling, tired breath, before sucking in another and another. He was shaking so goddamn hard, and Foggy just wanted to throw a bunch of blankets on him, but the last thing he wanted to do was rattle that hypersensitive skin. Worrying at the inside of his cheek, he made his way back to the gun and the whistle. He didn't blow the dust out of it like he wanted to. It'd have to wait, or he'd have a very disoriented Matt, and a disoriented Matt in a state like this one became _extremely dangerous_.

Bottled fucking lightning. Foggy licked his lips and studied his friend closely. Matt sort of just stood there, swaying, blinking hard as if it would clear the shit out of his head. He looked like a lost, confused animal. God.

Matt tilted his head again, figuring out where Foggy was before he talked. His voice was dull, but it was definitely Matt again. "...I don't...remember how I got here." He sounded defeated, afraid, even though he was the one that just saved his friend's life.

Foggy shouldered the rifle. "You usually don't. It's okay. I know the way back." He pocketed the whistle, but didn't move toward Matt, giving him space, giving him time. It always took a few more minutes than the last whenever this shit happened. And one day, he wasn't going to come back at all.

He did not continue that train of thought. He very carefully avoided it, shifting his thoughts to less terrifying things like _is there enough water for the next three days?_ and _am I gonna get botulism from that can of spaghetti soup?_   He did say what he felt, though, knowing Matt could pry it out of him anyway. His voice was heavy with simple truth.

"I hate what that shit did to you, man."

"Yeah. It's not—it's not—nng, pl-pleasant." Still having difficulty with the whole words thing. Sometimes it lasted hours. Matt licked his lips and flexed his fingers, making a confused noise at the stickiness of the blood. "I need—I need—I need help." His voice was so small. It shot through Foggy's brain and chest, a broken red-feathered arrow of pure ice, turning his entire body cold.

But he smiled, wan and fragile, letting it into his voice, and offered his arm. "Okay, big guy, come here, I gotcha covered."

It took another long moment before Matt made his way shakily over. There would be no tightroping or graceful parkour on the way home, not this time.

He was getting worse.

Matt's face twitched, hiding a frown, as he reached out and clutched Foggy's elbow, fingers gentle but body language stiff and desperate. "Thanks," he breathed, trying his hardest not to lean against Foggy's side.

By the time they were rounding on the apartment, that was exactly what he was doing.

_And then he ran into a bunch of raiders. I mean, the entire movie is filled with raiders, but these guys were like, sick. Like animals._

_Feral, Fog?_

_...Yeah. Feral._

\---

Foggy chewed on the end of his pen as he watched Matt sleep, curled up in a ball on top of the bedding. Too hot for blankets, but not because of the weather. It was just past noon, or he was pretty sure it was, but he didn't have a clock. They went by the sun, but sometimes it felt like it was daytime for a week, with the suffocating heat and dust.

He leaned back down, scribbling into a worn notebook with his splintered pen. The date, or approximation: _year 2 day 34 early morning_. Foggy had to let out a long breath to write the next part. Seeing it on paper, tangible, made him sick to his stomach.

_20-25 minutes. difficulty with speech. difficulty walking. tremors. immediately slept when home._ He left a space so he could supplement later how many hours Matt ended up passed out on the bed. _fever. no nausea. no appetite. disoriented._

Foggy stopped to wipe his face. He didn't want to write any more. Keeping a journal of his best friend's slick decline into a fucking wasting brain virus was the least fun thing he thought he'd ever done. And he'd done _salvia_ once. Nearly shattered a window trying to get away from the hallucinations. He wanted to puke, but he needed the calories in his stomach more.

_(Foggy, you need to write down what you see when this happens. It could help someone._

_Can it help you?_

_I don't think anything can help me.)_

Fucking hell.

He closed the notebook. Over the past year and a half, he'd filled four pages. Back and front. So many dates. So many long hours sat wondering if Matt would still be Matt when he came back to reality. Foggy put the pen down and steepled his fingers, pressing them into his mouth. He continued watching his friend sleep, paying attention to the steady rise and fall of his chest, the way his left fingers twitched a constant, random staccato on top of the blankets.

_(Oh, shit, Matt, they_ bit _you. Oh, Jesus._

_...God, fuck. Fuck, fuck. Don't touch it, Foggy. Don't touch me. Get the alcohol.)_

Foggy pinched the bridge of his nose, then got up and dug out an old Planters peanuts bottle, from one of the larger, more worn boxes in the kitchen, tilting it in the light to inspect the water they were storing inside. Discolored, but not a lot of dirt. He opened it, took a sniff. The faint scent of bleach hit his nose, and he knew if _he_ could smell it, it would be like a sledgehammer to Matt. He sighed, dug around, and kept looking, trying to find the cleanest container of water they had.

He settled on the one in the Gatorade bottle, and made his way over to the bedding.

"Matty, buddy," he breathed softly, keeping his distance, not daring to reach out and touch him. Because Matt's senses were always fucking turned on and sometimes he woke up in attack mode. And if he'd lapsed back into the sickness while he slept, well. "...Matt."

A grumble. Matt curled up tighter, pressing his face into his knees. "No."

Foggy let out a breath he didn't realize he'd trapped in his throat. Speech. Good sign. "Can you drink some water?"

It took him a few sleepy seconds to answer. "Yeah." Drinking was probably the furthest from Matt's mind, but he knew better. He knew to stay hydrated. Even if he hadn't eaten in two days, he would always drink water.

"Awesome. Sit up?"

Foggy had done this too many times. The first was ages ago, in this apartment, back when there was still a couch and a broken door and a bed with a mattress and frame. Oh, and civilization. It was a memory that felt unreal, like it had happened to someone else or he'd watched it in a movie. He helped get Matt upright, then guided the bottle to Matt's lips, watched closely as he drank in slow sips to start, then bigger gulps.

"Okay, okay, that's enough. We're out of bleach, remember?"

Matt grunted, his tongue darting out to collect what had dripped around his mouth, desperate for every available drop. "I'll go get more."

"Not now. Get some more sleep." The way his voice cracked in its half-whisper made him want to stab himself in the throat. Pathetic. But he swallowed it down, capped the bottle, and sank back on his haunches. "How you feeling?"

"Head hurts."

Foggy mentally reminded himself to write _headache_ into the notebook. It wasn't a new symptom, but Matt could talk, and that was _way_ better than the last time, when he'd watched him go through a weird cycle of sleep and half-sleep, curling himself up in a corner like a wounded cat, finally coughing out words after about twelve hours. That had not been a great day.

But to be fair, Foggy didn't have very many great days.

It was also the day he had thought, for sure, that he'd lost Matt's mind to the sickness. It wasn't enough that he had to worry about shrapnel and aliens and dehydration, he had to keep creepy sorts of tabs on his friend's mental state to make sure he wasn't going to go batshit and disappear permanently into the night.

Oh, shit, right, he was supposed to be talking right now. Matt had his face turned toward him, expectant, and he'd left him hanging because he couldn't stop worrying about the same stupid bastard that was waiting for him to say something.

Right. Words. "Want some Tylenol?"

"No. Not bad enough."

They saved it for the worst shit. That's what Matt said, anyway, but 'worst shit' apparently didn't apply to arrows sticking out of his back, which was Foggy's utter definition for 'the worst possible shit'.

Foggy moved into a sitting position, mirroring his friend, who dropped his head in his hands and dragged his fingers through his hair. His left hand was much slower and a lot more clumsy. The hangover, Foggy called it, except it wasn't a hangover at all, it was like the recovery from a seizure, except the seizure was Matt totally losing his fucking shit and reverting to some strange wild animal—

_(Feral, Foggy, they're_ feral— _)_

He felt the sob rise up painfully in his throat, but swallowed it down. It was time to be the strong one in this bizarre backwards relationship.

Matt heard the swallow. Of course he heard it. His head tilted, concerned, and only Matt could have a different tilt of his head for _concerned_ or _alert_ or _anxious_ or _happy_.

"Foggy," he said, softly, reaching out a hand. His right one, because it did not shake, and wouldn't be a reminder. "I'm okay."

And Foggy took that hand, and crossed the space between them, and yanked Matt into a tight hug. Fuck that shitty rib of his and fuck the fact he didn't much like hugs, Foggy had to grip him tight _right now_ or he might just _go fucking feral like his best fucking friend could any day now._

"I'm okay," Matt murmured into his ear. His left hand moved jerkily over Foggy's back, the right one still crushed between them. "I'm me. I'm still me."

The sob twisted and finally bubbled up and out Foggy's mouth. "I'm not gonna lose you to this, you understand? No fucking way. Even if I have to yank into that diseased head of yours and pull you out my own goddamn self. Okay?" He could hear the desperation in his own voice, and he knew he was only trying to force himself to believe the words he was blubbering out. "I hate this. I hate watching you go through this."

"Better me than you, Foggy."

At that, he pulled away, held Matt at arm's length. "How can you even say that shit? You think I wouldn't take that shit myself so I wouldn't have to watch you—watch you—" Fuck, he couldn't finish. _I can't watch you turn into what you killed in that street, what I shot three of the other day because they were late stage and suck at being sneaky so you heard them coming from a mile off._

"I'm not gonna. I'm not. I would have already. We've talked about this."

Right, Matt's shining fantasy of a running theory that he had some sort of resistance, maybe radiation or maybe his senses, something that was holding the disease off, stopping it from ripping his brain to shreds entirely. It peaked at times of stress, _very high stress_ , which made Foggy half-proud because it always happened when Foggy was in danger or Foggy was sick or there was something wrong with Foggy but it also made him half-terrified because _what was going to happen when Foggy actually died_. But the fact of it being triggered by that, in particular, made Matt talk in his 'yeah I went to college' voice that it might be connected to some long-ridiculous-word part of his brain that was close to his visual cortex and Jesus it was really a stupid theory but Foggy had to believe it, _had to believe it_ , because losing Matt was simply not an option right now.

"You have no idea how fucking scary it is to see you like that, man." Heaving, snarling, pure violence, pure fury. It wasn't his Matt. It wasn't. It wasn't even _Daredevil_ , and Jesus, it had been ages since he'd thought of that shit.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Oh my God, stop apologizing. Not the time."

"Actually, I'm more sorry about not sticking close to you. That guy could have gotten you. He could have...Foggy, he could have infected you."

_So could you_ , he thought, but didn't say. Matt would have to bite him, or maybe have sex with him, he wasn't sure. But it wasn't passable through touch, or coughing, or blood. Or maybe it was and Foggy had won the goddamn lottery and had an immunity. Who fucking knew. But Matt was extremely careful, always had been, never came close when he had an episode, always kept his distance whenever he was feeling off.

It hadn't spread to Foggy in the entire year and a half since Matt had gotten tagged. He always told himself that if it was going to happen, it would have happened already. Fuck, they even slept together. If that wasn't proof that he wasn't going to catch it, he didn't know what else was.

_Mine!_ he remembered Matt roaring. Not his voice. Not his Matty. _Not yours!_

It would be kind of sweet if it wasn't so terrifying.

Foggy rubbed his face with the back of his hand; Matt reached out and chuffed his chin lightly with a knuckle, attempting a smile. It wasn't the smile Foggy liked the most. It was a weak shadow only. "I'll always come back to you," Matt said, tilting his head forward, and for a weird, funny second Foggy thought he'd go in for a kiss like they were in a romantic film, but no, he was just being Matt and Matt tilted his head around a lot, even when they were so close to each other that their foreheads were nearly touching.

"I'll always come back," he repeated, earnest and honest.

_That fucking genuineness holy fuck I'm going to kill this man someday._

"Yeah, Matty. You know I'll always be here."

\---

Keeping Matt at home after a plateau with the sickness was much, much easier, which actually made it more depressing. Watching Matt mill around the apartment aimlessly, exhausted, barely himself, made Foggy wish for the days when he'd have crumpled pages of pornography hurled at his head.

It was late afternoon. Matt was sat up on the useless radiator, leaning his head against one of the boards over the window, fidgeting with a frayed thread on the seam of his jeans. Foggy thought it really bizarre that he knew Matt well enough to know what 'staring out into space' was, on a face whose eyes were always staring out into space _._

He was never quite sure if the spaciness was from the recovery period, or because Matt just really liked to brood. About everything. Terminal illnesses especially.

"How's your head, bud?"

"Better. Thank you."

Ugh, that bland politeness and that faint, dull voice. Translation: _This is an automatic response set by the system's main computer. Please hang up and try again._

He hung up and decided to call back later.

By evening, Foggy was sick of it. Nothing was worse than silence from a guy he knew could talk his fucking ear off with bitching or reports about the area or obscure state laws. He found that stupid titty magazine and pulled out a page, crumpling it into a ball before hurling it at his friend's face. Since he was throwing it from all the way back in the kitchen, his aim was pretty far off.

_Ring ring, motherfucker, pick up your phone._

Matt jerked and caught it out of the air anyway. He always did, never turning his head. It should have been creepy. Foggy mostly thought it was seriously badass.

"Wake up, Matty. I'm bored."

Matt leaned his head against the wall, messing around with the paper in his hands, which were apparently excited to have something new to fidget with. His left hand had finally stopped shivering. A look crossed his face, somewhere between 'Murdock-Is-Exhausted-And-Doesn't-Want-Interactions' and 'Murdock-May-Or-May-Not-Cry-Soon'. Awesome.

"I'm so tired, Fog."

Foggy could hear it in the weight of his words, see it in the curve of his back. This was normal. Matt wallowing in depression was _normal_.

"I know, buddy."

If Matt's eyes had worked, he'd probably be staring out the window, eager to keep his focus away from his friend. As it were, his hands were doing the focusing, and Matt was just staring somewhere near the windowsill. "When do you think it'll...you know. When I won't be me anymore?"

Fuck, not this conversation. _Anything_ but this conversation. It was one thing to roll it around in his head, privately, but to talk about it with the person who would very soon be lost because of it—

Nope, he couldn't do this. Not right now.

"Don't worry about it," Foggy said. His voice was strained. _Please drop the topic, Matt, you know I'm total shit at this_. He shouldn't have thrown that paper. It was his fault he turned the conversation switch to _on_ in the first place.

"I _do_ ," Matt breathed. The paper was in shreds underneath him. "What'll you do if I..." he sucked in a quick breath, let it out sharply through his nose, "...what if I turn on you, Fog?" The tone of his voice told him that he'd been thinking about this for a long time. Probably the entire time he'd been sitting by the window. So, about five hours.

_Fucking fuck fuck fuck fuck_. "I don't know." Foggy's voice shook. He rubbed his face and made his way over to the chair, turning it in Matt's direction. "I don't think you will."

"Why not?" Matt tore up the last bit of paper, and went to picking at his fingers.

"Because you haven't done it yet."

"That doesn't mean it won't happen."

"Doesn't mean it will, either."

He sighed through his nose again. His eyes darted along the floor, the wall, rapid. Fuck, he was gonna say something bad. "I want to..." he licked his lips, took a breath, licked them again, fuck, _how awful was this thing he was trying to say going to be_ , "...I need to show you where to hit me. The quickest way to get me down. I can't...I don't want to hurt you."

_You_ are _hurting me, what the fuck kind of conversation is this, you know I'd rather let you bite me than_ kill _you, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the_ fuck. "Okay."

Matt climbed down carefully off of the radiator, then crossed the room and grabbed Foggy's knife off the ground where he'd dropped it in a rush to get Matt laying down on the bedding.

When he turned toward Foggy, blade in hand, it became an image of Matt with a knife that really _was_ terrifying, and his breath caught up in his throat again.

Matt paused. "I'm not feral _now_. Don't panic." He tried to force humor into his words, but his voice was still kind of weak from earlier. Matt realized it was futile and cleared his throat, serious this time. "Foggy."

"No, I'm—I'm fine. God, I'm totally fine. I really really _really_ want to know where to stab you so you'll die the quickest. It'll be fun. Like a party." He was rambling. He couldn't help it. It was just like Matt's inclination to stammer and stumble on his words. "Like a tango. I can do a mean two-step, Matty."

"I know you don't want to do this." Matt moved closer anyway, holding the weapon carefully. "But _I_ need to do this. Okay? I need to know you can protect yourself from me."

Right, because _Matt_ was the one who needed reassurance right now, when Foggy was the one being shown how to kill his best friend, his best friend that had a fucking alien virus chewing steadily away at his brain, every day, _every day_ , breaking down that solid wall that made him human, smashing his clarity into bits whenever Foggy's blood was in the air and—

Fuck. Yeah, Matt actually did need the reassurance. _You're such an asshole sometimes, Nelson, goddamn._

"Okay, Matty," Foggy ended up saying, after a heavy swallow. "Show me."

Matt hovered close. He smelled like blood, the dust of the city, and the layers and layers of sweat that had built on both of them because they certainly weren't going to use their water rations to bathe. Gently, because Matt was never anything but gentle to him, he took Foggy's hand, bent the fingers so his index and middle were extended, and placed them at the end of his own jaw, right where the curve of the bone met the jugular.

"If I'm close enough, right here. Stab _upward_. If you have a knife this big, it'll probably hit my brain. And you'll want to hit my brain."

Foggy felt a heaving cold wave of nausea coming, and he opened his mouth to say something about it, but then it hit him all at once, and instead of fighting it back like he had most of the day, he shoved himself away from Matt and vomited his two sips of water and half a can of potatoes right onto the floor.

"...Oh," Matt said. The knife dropped to his side loosely.

"God— _fuck—_ sorry, man. I'm sorry." It was strange being the one apologizing all of a sudden. He dry-heaved, got himself under control, spit once, and groaned, "Matt, I can't do this. I can't fucking do this."

Matt's face twisted into something weird for a few seconds until he fought it off. No, wait, Foggy recognized it, because it came back again and Matt was crying, the stupid fucking asshole.

"And you think I can?" he asked, softly.

No, Foggy didn't think Matt could do it, either. Neither of them could do it. They were just stuck in this stupid fucking world in this pancake of a city in this crumbling apartment and Matt was going to die of a virus and afterward Foggy was going to live by himself for probably twelve hours before he threw himself into the Hudson.

None of this he said out loud.

"Come 'ere, Matty," he said, waving a hand, and he heard the knife clatter to the floor before his scrawny, wiry, trembling mess of a best friend was burrowing into his arms and pressing his face into Foggy's neck and _sobbing_ , low and cracked like the streets outside the apartment. Foggy held him as tight as he could, knowing it could never be tight enough, and pushed his hands through Matt's ruined haircut. "I'm here," he breathed, because he couldn't say _It's okay_ or _You're gonna be fine_ or _Surprise, this is all a dream, you're actually passed out on your desk at work_. The last one would have been pretty nice.

"I'm scared," Matt whispered, between the huge gulps of air he was swallowing down, "I'm scared, Fog, I'm so fucking scared."

"I know."

"I don't want to hurt you," were the next words, and Foggy knew if he was in the same position, he would be saying _'I don't want to die.'_ Repeatedly, as loud as he could.

But Matt wasn't afraid of dying. He knew it was inevitable and that it was rushing fast toward him and there was nothing he could do to get out of its way. Foggy wished he had that same strength. "I know you don't," he spoke at length, still carding his fingers through Matt's hair, catching his knuckles on all the tangles. "I'll be here with you, until the end. You know that. I'm never gonna walk away from you."

Matt clutched him harder—fuck, his hands were iron and his arms were steel girders—and pushed himself as close as he could get. The tears were hot and slick on Foggy's neck. At least it wasn't blood.

They stayed like that for about an hour, until there was no strength left to cry out, and the puke was dried up on the floor. Neither cared.

It had been a bad day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I really don't mind what happens now and then._  
>  _As long as you'll be my friend at the end._  
>  3 Doors Down


	3. hurricane

  
The next day wasn't much better. Matt moped, and brooded, and didn't talk much, but his strength returned, as it always, impossibly, did. By the evening, his movements had perked up, he was more receptive to conversation, and he actually sat and ate a whole can of carrots.

But life really hated Foggy. And it really, _really_ fucking hated Matt.

As the sun was starting to set, and they were having a gentle and easy banter—something Foggy could have really cared less about, he just wanted his friend to _talk—_ Matt suddenly fell quiet.

"What's the matter?"

"...My, uh. My hand's shaking again."

It was more pronounced than the last time. More pronounced than it had been when the plateau started. Foggy stared at it through the thick beams of sunlight cutting through the dust, trying to smother the worry and horror crawling up his throat. This hadn't happened before. It always happened _during_ the plateau, not afterward, and never this badly.

Matt's voice was tiny. "What do we do?"

"I don't know."

He didn't. He didn't have the first fucking clue on what it was supposed to mean. Foggy rolled it around in his mind, over and over, and he knew Matt did the same, while clenching and unclenching his fist and trying _so fucking hard_ to keep the emotion off his face. He couldn't. He really sucked at it.

"Let's get some sleep. Maybe you're tired."

"...Yeah. Okay."

It took Matt ages to finally sleep, and when he did, it was a fragile, fitful thing. Foggy woke up in the middle of the night with Matt's hand draped across his stomach, the sickness twitching through his fingers. He let out a silent sigh and placed his own hand on top of Matt's, feeling the inconsistent jumping of muscles against his palm as he drifted back off again.

It didn't go away.

When Matt got up in the morning, Foggy knew, but didn't rouse completely. He listened distantly on that hazy edge of slumber as Matt mumbled a prayer, then got silently to his feet and went to the roof. Matt likely didn't think Foggy heard him, but he did, because Foggy always listened, even if it was strangled, half-hysterical sobbing, trying so hard to be quiet that it actually got louder.

Matt came back down after an hour, and Foggy pulled himself out of the blankets, and neither of them talked about it. They ate breakfast—a Nutri-Grain bar that they split, what a delight—and spoke quietly about anything they could come up with that wasn't about the sickness. Matt was very good at keeping the focus of conversation off of himself, even before all of this had happened.

Then Matt started throwing shit at him again, half as a distraction, half out of a desperation for some kind of norm, and Foggy let him do it. It was obnoxious as hell, but he cut it with the fact that it meant Matt was starting to become _Matt_ again, more man than sickness, and stalwartly put up with the bullshit.

"I want to go find some bleach," Matt declared after he'd used the rest of the _Hustler_. He also wanted to find another magazine to fuck around with, but he didn't mention that, thinking he was being clever. He wasn't. Foggy was wise to his game. The little shit.

"Not yet," Foggy said. "You'll fall off of a stoplight and break your neck."

Matt didn't get to go.

That evening Matt woke up in the dead of night panting and sobbing into Foggy's armpit, mumbling under his breath, the words fracturing before leaving his mouth. His left hand trembled over Foggy's sternum. It might not have been from the sickness this time.

"All right, buddy," Foggy whispered, shifting to try to dislodge the giant crying tick from his underarm, "that can't smell good. And with that nose?"

Matt must have heard him—obviously he did, he could hear a cockroach on the street outside for God's sake—because he jolted with a sudden snort, lifting his head like a man coming up out of water for air. His breathing sped up to a hard pant, and Foggy knew even though it was pitch black in the apartment, his eyes were jerking around like crazy. Matt got his arms under him and pushed himself up.

Words tumbled from Matt's mouth in a weak huff. "Where—where—?"

"Shh, shh," Foggy breathed, gently circling his hand around his friend's elbow. "It's Foggy—" he started, but starting was all he was able to do, because Matt realized suddenly how close he was, and scrambled to his feet. Or tried, but the goulash of clothes and threadbare blankets caught up in his legs, and he only got halfway up before slamming back down to the floor. Instead of panicking and trying harder to get away, Matt just—horrifyingly, depressingly— _gave up_ , curling up into a ball on the floor and pushing his face into his knees with a wrecked sob.

Foggy got himself into a sitting position, palming his hand roughly over his face. He inched himself over to the mess on the floor, the whole apartment poorly lit by moonlight through the boarded windows. Seeing Matt like that was enough to wipe any thoughts of sleep from his mind for a long while.

"Hey, buddy," he whispered, flinching at the way Matt tucked himself up tighter, like a kid expecting a beating. "You know where you are?"

It was a question he'd asked a lot in the middle of the night.

When Matt didn't answer him, he pried a little harder: "Can you talk to me, buddy? That doesn't look very comfortable. Why don't you come back over here?" It sounded like he was trying to get a stray dog to come to him.

He used the tone because it worked, because Matt _did_ uncurl himself and inch over and deposit himself right back against his side, clinging tightly. His blunt fingernails dug into him through the shirt as he clutched Foggy like he'd float away without something to hold him down.

Foggy held in his sigh of relief. Talking Matt over from the floor was a lot fucking easier than talking him down from the roof, which is where he ended up sometimes when his brain fucked itself in his sleep. It was always worse during the plateau, probably because his brain was halfway to fucked already.

"Shh, shh, it's okay," Foggy whispered anyway, into the air, as he smoothed a hand over Matt's shoulder. He kept his voice low, and constant, which was the most comforting. "Just a dream, Matty. You and me in your apartment. You were just dreaming. I know it sucks. Deep breaths, buddy, try to get some more sleep."

Neither of them did.

Matt got up just before dawn, wandering around silently in the apartment for half an hour before ending up on the roof, where he sat on the edge and stayed there. Foggy got up and followed him after five minutes, to find him staring out into a rather pretty sunrise that he'd never see. It was probably the poison in the sky that made it look so verdantly green.

Foggy stepped up behind him, and the tilt of Matt's head told him he'd been detected.

"You know, the sky's green now," he said, grunting as he stepped up on the edge of the roof and plopped himself down next to his friend, pushing a hand through his hair and yawning. The height did not bother him. Matt would never let him slip.

He did scoff at Foggy's descriptor, though. "No, it isn't."

"It is. It _so_ is."

"I guess I'll defer to your expertise, then." Ah, good. Nice long words that required an upper brain to understand and use. Excellent sign.

Foggy tried to hide his joy. "I guess this would be a really shitty time to tell you I'm colorblind."

Matt barked a laugh, all surprise, and the sound skipped across the uneven streets ahead of them like rocks on a pond. Foggy listened to the echoes and reveled in them, letting the grin spread across his face. The stupid prick didn't even know how pure and good his laugh was, but at that moment Foggy was reminded of how sappy and stupid his own _brain_ was, and swallowed a disgusted groan.

They sat in the quiet for a while. Matt studied his left hand, head tilted down like his eyes could see it. It shook and shook. He'd clenched his fist for so long in the last day or so that he'd worried dark red scrapes into his palms with his fingernails.

"Sorry I woke you up last night," he mumbled. He looked exhausted.

"Are you kidding? Your face was in my armpit. Are you sure the smell didn't give you that nightmare?"

Another laugh. Another stomach-twisting burst of joy in Foggy's chest. Gross.

"Pretty sure I smell enough for both of us."

"Nah, you're all roses and puppy breath compared to everything else."

Matt's eyebrows crumpled. "Puppy breath?"

Foggy laughed. "You never held a puppy before?"

"Of course I have."

"Well, then you know what puppy breath is."

"I don't remember. It's been a while."

"Okay, well, trust me, that's what you smell like."

"I guess it's better than menthol cigarettes."

"What's with you and menthol cigarettes?" Foggy could vividly remember a time when Matt would walk an entire city block to avoid crossing paths with someone smoking one.

"Ugh. Don't get me started. The mint's like a knife in my nose and the smoke's like brillo pads. It's like getting embalmed." It didn't happen often, but Foggy was suddenly very glad he didn't share Matt's enhanced senses. If it was enough for Matt to complain about, even years later, it must have been torture.

Still. "You're such a drama queen sometimes."

"You say that, but Foggy. It's the _worst thing_.  And _so many people_ smoked them."

"At least it's one thing you don't have to worry about anymore."

"Thank fuck for that shit."

Sometimes, hearing Matt spew curse words like he was born with them in his mouth sounded so weird. Weird and _fucking hilarious_.

Foggy snorted a laugh, and heard it echo from the street, shadowed quickly by a reflexive follow-up from his friend.

By the afternoon, the guy was so jittery from pent-up energy and so _Matt_ that it was hard to imagine the sight of him as anything else. Foggy remembered, he always remembered, but he pushed it to the far corner of his mind, knowing that Matt would have another plateau eventually and they'd go right through the cycle again. And he knew one day he wouldn't get to have that plateau, because Matt would climb right over the mountain and right out of Foggy's life, either wild and gone or dead on the floor with the knife in his throat.

He complained a lot less when taking care of Matt in this state. Getting his wrist jammed from a wrong jump was one thing, but crawling back from the sickness that had already destroyed the minds of a million people while the people _with_ the sickness killed two million more was something that could almost be fucking _revered_. Matt's determination to live, to be _Matt_ , was, as Foggy put it, batshit bonkers.

Foggy didn't know how Matt did it. But he would be there, at his buddy's side, until he couldn't, and that was something he did know with absolute certainty.

It was really a disgustingly sappy line of thought.

\---

A balled up piece of paper glanced off of the top of Foggy's head as he stared out the window, trying to figure out if he was seeing more smoke or just a trick of the light on the dead water of the river.

"Cut it out, Matt."

"The _bleach_ , Fogs. The _bleach_."

There was still some shaking in Matt's voice, some weak listing in his left leg, and of course his left hand, so no, not yet, calm your fucking shit, Murdock. He was up on the roof landing, legs dangling over the side as he ripped up a magazine— _US Weekly, Hottest Men Of 2015_ , where had he even _found_ that—and turned it into small, annoying projectiles. Foggy was getting really fucking sick of collecting them all up and dumping them off the roof like giant pissy snowflakes.

"Shut the fuck up about the bleach, goddamn. We don't have any water for the bleach to clean! It's like getting curtains before you install a window!"

"I'll get water, too. Foggy."

Resilient, that motherfucker. Resilient and _annoying._ Foggy was going to kill him _._

Because it was funny to joke about murdering your friend two days after that same friend tried to give you a succinct demonstration about how to stick a fucking knife in his brain.

Another piece of paper.

"I am going to shove that fucking magazine down your throat if you hit me one more time, Matt." He tried so hard to sound scary. It was difficult when the only person he had around to compare himself to was _Mr.-Not-Yours!_ over there.

Yeah, he never told Matt about the bits where he would roar, claim ownership, then fight to the death for what he only assumed were Foggy's affections like some weird Robin Hood competition. It was just so strange and primal and he knew the conversation would get awkward. He had his theories about it, but kept them tightly to himself.

Another ball bounced off of his head. He gritted his teeth.

"Seriously?" Foggy got to his feet. Paper balls swam around his ankles. The fuck, Matt. He had to find some other source of amusement. "You do know I have to clean this up later, right?" He really wanted to say, _You dickhead, I just helped coax you back out of that stupid sickness over the past three days, what the fuck is your problem_ , but he didn't because he would get The Pout, and then The Mope. He could not risk getting The Brood.

"Foggy. The bleach."

"Fuck the bleach!"

Matt raised a hand. There was paper in it.

"If you throw that at me, I swear to God—"

Yep, Matt was going to get himself murdered by his best friend. Foggy, though, with a grunt of amazement for himself, caught the paper out of the air. He tried to squeeze it like a postapocalyptic stress ball, but Matt had compressed it really tight. Fuck that guy's superior muscles. He was a scrawny wreck, it wasn't fair.

Foggy growled, _nothing at all_ like the frightening noises Matt could make, and stalked across the room, toward the stairs. "You blind-ass bastard, hold still, I told you I was shoving this down your throat."

Matt yelped with laughter— _laughter_ , loud, such a bright and clear and rare noise that it stopped Foggy right in his tracks for a few seconds—and darted outside, onto the roof. Well, fuck, if throwing paper around and being a pain in all of the asses was going to get Matt to laugh like that, even with the tremor in his hand, Foggy would gladly drown in all the fake tits and photoshopped abs that they could find.

It was a thought that Matt could never learn about, of course, because Foggy had a limit, and the apartment only had so much square footage.

Outside, it was hot, cloudless. Foggy stepped onto the worn surface of the roof, plastering a fake glower over his _extremely genuine_ grin. Matt wasn't in front of him. He turned around immediately, knowing where to look next.

Matt was crouched on the edge of the small section of building that held the door, hair twitching in the dusty breeze, grinning. Foggy remembered a blank, pale face and a twisted, enraged roar, and could barely believe he was looking at the same person.

"Get down from there." It sounded like he was trying to coax a cat out of a tree. With the rate that Matt brought him broken crap and stuff to eat, the comparison wasn't too much of a stretch. "God, you're a dick."

"Hm. Your heart's pounding."

"Because I'm scared you're going to fall off the roof and break your head open."

"Liar."

Foggy narrowed his eyes. One of the most useless expressions to throw at Matt. He did it anyway. "Not yet, dude, I told you. Tomorrow, okay?"

"Two hours?"

"Tomorrow."

"Four hours."

" _To-mor-row_ ," Foggy repeated again, enunciating every syllable like Matt was a fucking five-year-old. Sometimes it felt like it.

"Three hours."

"Three h—what—this isn't a _court debate_ , you fuck! And negotiating doesn't work that way." Foggy rolled his head back on his shoulders, glaring at the poisoned sky. "Climb down before you fall down. Jesus, you drive me crazy sometimes."

Matt stood up, casting his shadow across Foggy's face. His threadbare shirt whipped gently in the wind—he _had_ needed to get another one, after the brains incident, but luckily they'd had one stashed away that Foggy had forgotten about. It had a horse on it. Sometimes Foggy wondered who owned these articles of clothing before they'd dug them out of a collapsed building or half-buried car or tipped dumpster. Either way, this one was too big for Matt's frame, and he shoved his hands in his pockets to keep it from billowing comically off of him in the wind.

"Come on, Matt. I'll get you something to eat."

"I don't want to eat."

"Well, tough titties. You haven't eaten since yesterday."

"I haven't been hungry."

"Of course not. You're never hungry. And then you wonder why you keep getting hurt and stuck here for two days. Are you seeing the cycle yet?"

"I can't see anything."

Foggy huffed a dramatic sigh to the tiny, wispy cloud that his eyes caught passing overhead. It was times like these he wished he was religious. At least he'd have something to complain to that wouldn't snap back at him. "Get the fuck down, idiot."

Matt tilted his head. The grin on his face had been steadily fading into a soft smile as he'd talked—negotiated, whatever, it didn't matter, he sucked ass at it—and it dropped from his face completely as a stronger gust of wind blew past him. He shifted a little on his feet, and his eyes started tracking rapidly to and fro. His head tilted again, seeking something out.

Well, shit. It was _that_ look. _Murdock is on the trail!_   There went all of Foggy's immediate plans. He'd been really looking forward to lunch.

"What? Matt, what is it? What do you hear?"

The response was a faint, vague hum as Matt turned around, facing the city. He crouched down again—thank fuck for that, because the wind was making him look unbalanced—and kept searching. Foggy didn't bother asking him again what it was, knowing he'd get an answer as soon as Matt had sniffed it out. Heh.

"I'm gonna get the gun," Foggy said, and when Matt didn't tell him to do otherwise, he moved into the apartment to grab it from where it rested against the wall between the windows. Fucking paper everywhere. It was like a hoarder's ball pit. The wind felt stronger when he stepped back outside. "Jesus. Is it bad?"

Matt was hunkered down at the far corner of the roof now, listening, breathing deeply. It was like he couldn't figure out what he was looking for. An odd thing to see, because Matt was the human equivalent of the Internet—he could find _anything_. And he remembered _everything_.

Foggy approached him, quiet enough to—hopefully—not interfere with his post-apocalyptic Googling, but—also hopefully—loud enough so Matt would sense he was nearby, even with SafeSearch off.  Fuck, he missed the Internet.

He moved next to Matt's shoulder, crouching, staring out at the ruins beneath them, trying to see with his eyes what his friend couldn't with his ears and nose. (Impossible, by the way. But he liked to feel useful.)

"Alien," Matt mumbled dreamily, at length. "...Three blocks out. It's wounded." He shifted on his feet, turning toward Foggy, only a few inches away. "I don't think it can call for help."

"What's it doing out in the daytime?" What a stupid alien. It was gonna get itself shot. By Foggy, if he had anything to say about it. He listened while staring at Matt's drawn face two inches from him, watching his friend's eyes flick around as he focused, analyzed, adjusted.

"No clue. I don't speak alien."

"Ah, I knew I should have taken that instead of Punjabi."

"If only you had my foresight," Matt breathed, looking and sounding half-asleep, yet doing a pretty decent job of splitting his focus into two places. Unfair.

"At least I don't have your front-sight."

Matt snorted.

Foggy beamed.

"Come down with me," Matt mumbled. Still afraid to be alone. He wouldn't say it, but Foggy could hear it. The tremor was rattling him.

"Get fucked. I'm not getting anywhere close to it." He kept his voice to just a few decibels above silence. Less chance of the alien hearing him, less chance of throwing off Matt's concentration. "Not even during the day. I'm squishy."

"I can't aim the gun, Foggy."

"Drop it, Matt. The last time we went out together, you popped a guy's melon like a... well, like a fucking melon. Before that, you know, the whole _shrapnel incident?_ I'm a liability, dude. I can't backflip off of flagpoles like you can."

"I have never backflipped off of a flagpole."

"Don't lie about it."

"Maybe once."

" _Last week_. You did it _last week_. You looked like an act from _Cirque du Soleil_."

Matt tilted his head toward Foggy, eyebrows furrowing, but he was still listening to the street in front of them. Skills. "Really? Do you think they would have hired me?"

"Not with that work ethic."

"Come down with me," Matt repeated. He smelled like magazine paper.

"Again, you can go right ahead and get yourself fucked. I'm not a ninja like you." He lifted himself up long enough to glance down at the streets, the emptiness of them, the amount of open area available. "You think you can draw it out into the open? Like last time?"

Matt shrugged. "Yeah. Probably."

"If you can get it in the street, I can take it out from up here."

"You sure you want me down there alone?"

"Fuck no. But it's gonna catch us after dark if we don't take care of it now. I'm not taking one of those on at night, and neither are you."

Matt huffed. His breath shifted Foggy's hair. "You're never going to get over that, are you?"

"I saw your _intestines_ , Matt, how am I supposed to get over it?"

"It's just body parts."

"Yeah, _your_ body parts! Which you need! Or you'll die!" His voice tried to rise out of its hiss. He forced it back down. "Make a choice, Murdock, before it hears us and decides it wants to have a sleepover."

"Still hasn't moved." Matt straightened himself up carefully. "It's not like those bastards to come into the Kitchen. Can I go? I'll be careful."

Oh, wow, Matt was asking permission. He really _was_ rattled. Foggy blinked up at him. "Can you stay where I can see you? If it catches you in an alley, I won't be able to do anything." He rapped a knuckle on the stock of the rifle.

"I won't leave your sight, mom, I promise," he said softly. "You got your whistle?"

"In my pocket."

"Good. Give me a ring if you need anything."

Like it was a phone. Like they weren't about to play hide-and-go-seek with a goddamned alien. Foggy knew that Matt could hear his heartbeat getting faster and faster, and Matt, damn him, ignored it. He reached over to pat Foggy's shoulder before turning and straight-up launching himself off of the roof. What a little shit.

He wouldn't have jumped without an exit strategy, though, and Foggy saw the strategy before he even knew it was there: the arched windows that made up the majority of the apartment's walls, and Matt hopping from edge to edge like it was some kind of vertical, deadly Frogger game. Easier, though, because there were no cars to dodge—and, fuck, only Matt could make something like that look _easy._

Foggy got set up anyway, leaning the rifle on the edge of the roof, watching as his friend descended to the street, then started through the ruined buildings. Over support beams that rose up out of the dust like bones in a desert, under the burnt shells of cars, up and across half-gone brick walls, all shadow and fluidity. What was that stupid song? _Poetry in Motion?_   Well, it was stuck in Foggy's head now. Asshole.

But Matt did as asked, and stayed in Foggy's sights. He wondered how he accomplished _that_ shit. Yeah, Matt could do some pretty fucking awesome stuff with his ears and sense of smell and touch but he was still _blind_.  Foggy made a mental note to ask him later. (He never asked him later.)

He sighed, mumbling half of a lyric to himself as he leaned in and stared down the rifle scope, steadying it on the roof with one hand and adjusting the scope with the other. The streets below came into view, sharp and clear, and he moved his hand to the safety catch, clicking it off. Like any other time he'd done this, pointed a gun with Matt in its range, he hissed a plea in his head: _Please do not let me shoot that bastard_. He kept his finger off of the trigger anyway.

Matt was getting closer to their target. Foggy could tell by the way he slowed, starting to move in a half-crouch, slipping around corners and hugging the crumbling walls of the city. He centered the scope on his friend, then let it bounce around near his feet, not enjoying the sight of Matt under a crosshair. Especially _his_ crosshair.

He lifted his head from the gun, staring out into the streets with his normal shitty human eyes— _still better than Matt's, though!—_ to get a better picture of the area. It was probably in that gas station, or what might have at one point been a gas station. He couldn't remember what had been there before the poison.

Matt pressed himself against a leaning wall, still lined with fading sale posters, jamming a thumb over his shoulder without lifting his head, trusting Foggy to see it. _Behind me_ , was what the movement said. The alien was behind the wall. Matt wasn't being attacked yet, so it must have been really messed up. He stayed crouched there, head tilted, listening, listening, listening. And Foggy watched, watched, watched. And, finally, after probably a week or so, Matt made a move.

He hopped to his feet and over the wall like it wasn't there, and _fucking Christ hell damn, Matt, you fucking asshole,_ right out of Foggy's line of sight.

"Oh my God, I'm going to kill you," Foggy hissed, fumbling to get the whistle out of his pocket, to signal that Matt had done something wrong—or at the very least, to come right back to the apartment _this very instant, you're grounded, mister._

Foggy didn't get that chance, because there was a shout, and that strange rattling noise, half electricity and half earthquake, and Matt was booking it back over the wall at top fucking speed, and right behind him was the curved grey form of the fucking alien that _didn't look very wounded at all._

"Fucking hell," Foggy growled, holding the rifle close against his shoulder, biting his tongue as he tried to aim at the alien—it had too many legs and way too much neck—instead of Matt. "It's moving too fast, you idiot, you gotta get it to stop," he barked, unsure if he could be heard or not.

Matt slowed down almost immediately, and Foggy was sure the prick was grinning, probably saluting him or some other silly bullshit as he doubled back and hopped on top of a bus that had gone sideways through another bus.

A high, tittering noise cut through the air, like Morse code in fast forward, as the alien shifted, mercurial, and zeroed back in on Matt. The poison sunlight glinted off of its back, its plates or scales or _whatever they were_ shifting from grey to silver to green, iridescent, like a dragonfly's wings. Foggy leveled the scope at its back (was it even a back? Was it an organ they didn't even know about on Earth?) and fired, jerking the bolt back immediately after. That fast, percussive chitter pitched lower, raised up again, pitched down again, as it turned around, limb joints in all the wrong places. It was talking in whatever language it had. Well, yelling, if Foggy had to guess. At him.

"Ugh, learn English," he grunted, leveling off the scope, firing again. He hit it somewhere around its ass or its heart, and it squealed, the sound of metal on metal, then chittered and started toward the apartment.

Nope. Matt was right behind it, a bent piece of rusty metal in his hand, probably from the bus, which he flung out in a perfect, graceful arc to slap into the back of the alien's head. Or ass. Who knew.

"Oh, no, what'cha gonna do," Foggy sing-songed to himself as he lined up another shot, silently thanking Matt as he bounded out of the line of fire and onto a cement truck. This one sent the alien stumbling into the dust, that squeal starting up again. Less like metal, more like twelve pigs. God, he missed bacon.

Matt came back again, something else in his hand—what was it, a piece of glass?—that he threw, his accuracy impeccable as always, pulling the alien's attention again, perpetuating that easy rhythm of smacking the thing back and forth like a loud, pissy Badminton birdie.

They'd done this a lot. During the day, of course. At night, though, they hunkered down and stayed as quiet as possible to not be found. Not even _Mr.-Not-Yours-Ninja-Asshole_ could take one of them down at night. A large chunk of Foggy's sanity and twelve long fucking hours of stopping Matt's intestines from spilling out on the floor solidified _that_ fact.

The rifle punched him in the shoulder as he pulled the trigger again—four rounds left, and the other magazine was in the apartment below, but he could probably pull it off. He could see the slimy, silvery substance coming out of a hole in the alien's whatever, dripping into the dust as it lurched, confused, back toward Matt.

Matt was ready with a segment of construction rebar in his right hand. The alien lunged, and he backpedaled smoothly, adjusting for the uneven ground—if Foggy would have tried that, he'd be flat on his back in two seconds—as it he coaxed it closer to himself. Luring it in for the kill. He'd done it before.

Foggy watched through the scope, keeping his finger off the trigger. He _never_ put his finger on the trigger if he could see his friend near the crosshair. A smile spread across his face—pride—as he watched Matt dance back a few feet, slip out of the way of a wide swipe, and stab the motherfucker right through the head. _Definitely_ its head. Foggy knew this because it went limp immediately, collapsing into the street, pushing up a cloud of dust with its bulk.

As the dust cleared, he saw Matt standing near it, head tilted to listen, to make sure it was dead. After a minute, he shrugged and started back.

\---

"Nice," Foggy said as Matt heaved himself up over the edge of the roof. "I think that's our fastest time yet. World record."

Matt grinned, leaning over his knees a little to catch his breath. He was covered in dust. "It was wounded. We definitely had an advantage that time, Fog." He wiped his face, smearing the dust into his sweat and making himself look ten times worse.

"Water?"

"Yes, please."

Foggy held out the bottle. Planters Peanuts. Bottom of the barrel. It smelled like bleach and pennies. Matt took it anyway and drank half, then sloshed the bottle in his hand, feeling the weight of what was left inside. "Is this the last of it?"

"Yup."

"Hm." A tiny grin crossed Matt's face. Just a little shit-eating. "I guess I do gotta go get that bleach, then, huh?"

"We need water more."

"Why didn't you tell me we were running this low?"

Foggy crossed his arms. "Well, you've sort of been on the plateau."

Matt handed the bottle back. "How long this time? It's hard to... you know." Even he had trouble saying it sometimes. "I can't remember." The gaps in his memory probably scared the hell out of him.

It scared the living shit out of Foggy. "Four days."

"Fuck." He straightened up, rubbing the back of his neck, eyes gazing up at a sky that would have blinded anyone else. Funny bastard. "It's usually not that long."

"No, it's not."

Matt started clenching his fist again. Still shaky. He made a soft 'hm' noise, shook his hand like it was in pain, then shoved both of them into his pants pockets and wandered back to the apartment door. "So, bleach and water?"

"Flare gun," Foggy supplied readily, following him inside. It was marginally cooler. He was just glad to be out of the sun. "Maybe a flashlight. For the batteries." He thought about finding a radio, but he already knew all they'd be able to hear on it: static. Static and empty noise.

"What happened to the last flashlight?"

"It was in your backpack."

Matt's face twisted. "Why was it in there?"

"Accident. I meant to put it in my duffel bag."

"Mm. I'll see what I can do." Translation: he would fucking find one, he would hunt down everything Foggy ever asked for, he'd search until his arms fell off. Because that was what he did. Too much. "Time?"

"Uhh. I'd say about four hours."

"Okay. I'll be back before then."

Matt took one last sip of the water before starting up the stairs. Foggy started cleaning up the paper balls.

What a dick.

\---

"I got you something."

"It better be a bottle of water, I'm fucking thirsty."

Matt padded down the stairs, hefting a pair of those reusable cloth shopping bags over his shoulder, a duffel in his armpit. He was grinning. So fucking proud of himself.

Foggy took the bags. "Fuck, they're heavy."

"Yeah. Water's heavy. Eight p—"

"—Pounds per gallon, I know. You complain every time."

Matt didn't stop grinning. He dropped the duffel gently to the floor. "Should be four gallons there."

"Where'd it come from?"

"Where's it always come from?"

Foggy frowned. "I wish I didn't know." The answer: toilet cisterns. From every toilet that Matt could find in New York. The water in the upper tanks were usually all right, after they purified it with bleach. Thank fuck they had a guy that could sniff out bad water and stop them from drinking it. "Bleach?"

"Yeah. Here." Matt pulled the bottle from the duffel bag, tossed it over.

Foggy fumbled it. Matt snorted.

"I'm the blind one, here."

"I'm also not a ninja."

"This again. I'm not a ninja, Jesus." Matt held something else out. A flashlight. One of the big black motherfuckers that cops liked to carry. "I can't tell what size batteries it takes." Foggy watched his endless grin. This was like Christmas to Matt. He just _really enjoyed_ getting things for him. Being _useful._

God, he was far more useful than Foggy, and he didn't even know it.

"What's that?"

"I'm not sure. Smells like sugar."

Foggy caught the offering this time. "Cool, chocolate." It was sealed, and had obviously melted and solidified and re-melted a hundred times in the heat, and it was definitely a soup-like consistency now, but hell, he wasn't going to complain. "Nice, Matty."

Sometimes he said those things just to watch that grin brighten up.

Sometimes he kicked himself for his greed.

"Oh, yeah. Flare gun." Matt held it out. One of those bright red types, like they'd find in a boat emergency kit.

"No, that's yours. Take it with you when you go out next."

"Yes, mom."

Foggy watched Matt yank something else out of the duffel—another backpack. Okay, maybe more like a satchel. An old laptop case. It could hold shit, and that was good enough for Matt.

"Get yourself some new knives, too?"

"Yeah. Just two." One pocketknife, and one thing that looked like it was meant for chopping arms off. What sort of restaurant used shit like that? "Better than nothing. This long one isn't some kinda cartoon replica, is it?"

"Oh, absolutely. Bright pink. Very manly."

Matt was not impressed. "As long as it matches my bag, I guess." His grin barely faded, though.

"Hm, yeah. It's a nice fluorescent green. Goes good with your eyes."

"Brown, right? I don't look in a mirror that often."

"I wish you could. You look like a supermodel pirate sometimes."

"Supermodel _pirate?"_

"Yeah, man. You got a supermodel physique and your face is shaggy. Like a pirate." Foggy kept going, because Matt was huffing a chuckle out, and he wanted to hear more of that. "I bet you'd look dashing with an eyepatch. Or two eyepatches. Double dashing."

"Oh, I'm sure." Yes! He was laughing! "Much more intimidating than the whole black mask, I bet," Matt said, waving at his head to indicate what he was referring to. His left hand still trembled. He did not notice.

"Man, you looked like Zorro in that thing."

"Who, now?"

"He's like a... Spanish superhero or something? He rode a horse. Cut people with a sword. He wrote 'Z' in all their bodies. You know, with the sword."

"Sounds like a real winner."

"Yeah, the movie sucked."

Matt dug out the last thing in the bag. "I want to hear the story later, okay?" He held the object out. A plastic bottle with a blue top.

"Is that...?"

"I _think_ it is."

"Peanut butter!" Foggy dropped everything else to snatch it with both hands. "Oh, my god, I fucking love you, man. I'll tell you any story you want to hear for this one."

Matt's grin eased back into a content smile. "Tell me about Star Wars again. I like it."

They ate through the first movie— _A New Hope_ , because if there was one thing Foggy could protect Matt from, it was really fucking awful prequels—then laid down for the second, without blankets, because the cold hadn't chased the heat out of the apartment yet. Matt fell asleep before the twist at the end of Empire. His hand shivered at Foggy's sternum.

It had been a decent day.

\---

Foggy woke up in the dead of night from a dream that might have been awesome, and he might have seen titties. Whatever image had actually been there melted away too quickly for him to retain. Bummer. His back was twinging again, and he rolled over to stretch it out, tugging Matt close—

There was only air. Matt wasn't with him.

He was wide awake before he even sat up, pushing himself up from the floor, casting the blankets off of himself as he got to his feet. How could he have missed a nightmare, after Matt had been having them every night? God, he was an idiot.

The apartment was dark, but the moon was still out, so he could at least make out broad details. Like how empty it was.

"Matt?"

Silence.

He couldn't see him nearby. Foggy took a quick perimeter check, the windowsills, the kitchen, the closet, the crumpled wall of what used to be the bedroom, but nothing. He rubbed his face, hard, and made for the stairs.

"Matt?" he called up them, but got no answer. "Buddy? Are you okay?"

Still nothing.

His gut felt freezing cold. Something was _wrong_ , it was trying to tell him. He felt his heart hammer madly in his chest as he got up the stairs and saw the door had been left ajar. They never left it open. Alarms wailed in his head. _This is bad. This is bad. This is absolutely not okay._

He pushed the door open, stepped outside, and there was his friend, standing on the corner edge of the roof, facing the city. Moonlight curved around his form like an aura.

"...Matty?"

No response. He felt a chill whip through him, felt all the hair on his neck and arms stand up on end. Matt didn't budge, or even tilt his head, or give any indication at all that he was listening. Foggy had never seen him so still before, and besides the spasm in his left hand, Matt almost looked like a photograph.

_This is really not at all a good thing, this is really really not good_ , his brain was trying to warn him. It didn't work, because he started out across the roof, and it felt like he was dragging an extra twenty pounds through his feet alone. His mind tried to tell him that he needed a weapon by making his palms itch. It tried to tell him to hide by making him dizzy. It tried to tell him to run by ratcheting up his heartbeat. _Red flag. Red flag. Get out._

Foggy ignored all of them, and closed the last few meters to the edge of the roof.

"Matt," he whispered.

His friend tilted his head, quick and sharp, and followed the movement with the rest his body.

It wasn't Matt. _It wasn't Matt._

The animal that turned around wasn't his friend. The sightless brown eyes weren't the same ones that crinkled at the edges for every stupid joke. The shoulders weren't the same ones that carried home food and water and slumped when he was tired. The empty face wasn't the same one that grinned and pouted and shifted like mercury with expressions, so many of them, all of them so raw and honest.

Matt did not step down toward him from the edge of that roof. He'd gone up here as an animal, he'd gone up here as a man, but the animal was the only thing that came back.

_(The Thunderdome, Matty!)_

Foggy backed away. His heart was painful in his chest. His stomach was somewhere on the fourth floor. "Matt." Barely above a whisper. "Matty, it's me. You know me."

A growl. It rattled in Foggy's chest, dug deep and hard into his brain, copulated with the ice in his intestines and spread the cold through his whole body like an illness.

"Matt, no. Please, Matty, please, it's just me."

The growl deepened in response to the hurried speech. Matt took a step forward, and it was filled with purpose, predatory. He took another, and another, eyes fixated ahead of him, and Foggy was still backing away, just not fast enough, he was stumbling on his feet and his words and on the maelstrom of alarms shrieking in his head—

Matt's face twisted—a devil, a _demon—_ and he attacked.

Foggy heard someone screaming, "No! No, no!" but it was only himself, hysterical, but his voice may as well have been silent, because it reached no-one. Matt snapped for his face with an awful, awful noise, not human, not animal, and he was so _strong_ , all muscle, all instinct and rage and _sickness_. The only thing that saved Foggy was his reflex to hit as hard as he could, and he did. When his fist connected with Matt's temple it was like he was hitting himself.

Matt barely stumbled, but it was enough for Foggy to backpedal into the doorway, into the apartment and onto the walkway. His back hit the railing and Matt was on top of him before he could get any further, scrabbling at his neck, _snarling_ , the noise of it echoing through the apartment. It sounded like the rumble of a deep and terrible machine. Foggy grappled at Matt's arms, screaming for him to stop, begging and pleading for this to not be happening, this isn't his friend, _what did you do to Matt_ , but the animal kept coming.

The railing was harsh against his lower back and he used the only advantage he had over his friend: his weight. He got a grip on Matt's shirt and threw him off, aiming for the door but hitting the wall. Foggy kept retreating. Matt was back on his feet in half of a second.

_Stab upward_ , said the soft voice in his head, so familiar that it felt like his own.

He had to get to the knife, down by the bedding. If not the knife, then the rifle. His body thrummed with sudden, white-hot adrenaline, pure survival. He had to live and in order to live he had to kill the animal.

Matt came at him again before he could get down the first two stairs, and Foggy tried to shove him off like the last time, but he slipped, and they ended up in a tangle of snapping and growling and screaming and begging, landing in a messy pile where the stairs began to curve. Somehow he managed to avoid getting bitten, but Matt was scratching the hell out of him, nails in his shirt and against his arms and then all across his neck as those slender, powerful hands tried to get a hold on it to strangle him.

Foggy, by some miracle, ended up on his back with Matt on top of him, and he got one leg up and kicked the animal off of himself, sending him sprawling to the hardwood floor with a yelp. It wasn't the sort of noise Matt would make. An animal, though?

He got to his feet and down the last few steps, lurching for the bedding, but before he could get to the knife Matt knocked him flat on his face with a heavy swing to his shoulder. _God_ , it felt like he'd been hit by a truck, but he didn't hit his head, he didn't lose consciousness, so he had to _move._ Foggy scrambled back, hearing Matt snarl and heave for breath in the darkness, heard it echo in the ceiling, and saw the moonlight lick off one of his arms, along the edge of his eyes.

_(Mine! Not yours!)_

"Jesus Christ, Matt, Jesus, please, it's _me_ , you _know me, please—_ "

Matt knocked him to the floor again with a harsh hand on his face. It burned. It burned like the sun and all the stars that they couldn't see because of the poison.

_(I don't think anything can help me—)_

Foggy scrambled, panting, trying to get away, and his hand landed on something hard. He grabbed it and swung it indiscriminately at the animal. From the floor, it wasn't a great angle, but what he'd gotten a hold of was the flashlight, the big heavy black thing, and it connected with Matt's head with a horrible noise. Matt went down with a shocked grunt, hands scrabbling for purchase on the floor.

_(I'm scared, Fog, I'm so fucking scared—)_

Foggy was on his feet before he could even think about it, getting more distance between himself and the animal. Matt gasped for breath against the warped wood, his blood dripping to the floor, violet-black in the moonlight. He was keening, a sound that Foggy didn't even know he could make, pain and shock and tampered fury.

He went for the rifle. Got it in his hands. Flicked the safety catch to _off_.  Lifted it, leveled the barrel at his friend.

_(I don't want to hurt you—)_

Hesitated.

Matt was an explosion of movement from the floor, and Foggy pulled the trigger on reflex, but missed, oh _God_ did he miss, hitting the wall near the stairs instead of anywhere remotely near the animal, and he wasn't sure if that was what he'd been aiming for the entire time. Matt crossed the distance between them, bottled fucking lightning, his angel of Death, ripping the gun from his hands with such force Foggy thought he heard something in his hand snap. The animal tossed the gun away. It hit something in the kitchen that fell and shattered.

_(I got you something—)_

Foggy was backed up near the windows, now, and scrambled to get the chair in between them, anything to wall off the hurricane that was bearing down upon him. It roared in his ears, in his head, a force of nature, deafening.

_(I don't like the chair—What are you, twelve—?)_

He tripped on something, fell onto his back. Scrabbled his hands to find out what it was. Matt's satchel, with the water and the knives—

Matt climbed over the chair like it didn't exist, a huff blasting from his lungs that morphed into a snarl as he focused on the man on the floor. It was the most awful noise he'd ever made in his life. And he'd made a lot of noises.

Foggy yanked the satchel toward himself, sliced his palm open on a blade as he grabbed for one, desperate—

_(Stab upward—Stab upward—Stab upward—)_

He tried. He really did try. Instead of jaw and brain he hit shoulder and arm, and Matt flinched, but then one hand darted out and ripped the knife from him. Matt held it tightly, _no, God no,_ a weapon, he had a weapon now, he had a knife, _Jesus—_

Foggy fumbled for the satchel again. His fingers closed on cold plastic.

_(I'll be here with you until the end, you know that—)_

He yanked the flare gun out and fired it point-blank into his best friend's face.

Matt's snarl turned into a high yowl of pain, and the knife skidded to the floor, and he was backing up— _he was backing up—_ pawing at his face, startled and bewildered. He dropped to all fours, breaths whistling, scratching at his nose—the sulfur. The phosphorous. Matt never liked the smell.

The flare skittered across the floor and landed near the bedding, its roaring light casting bizarre, twisted shadows over the walls around them. Foggy ignored it, got back to his feet, and took a step forward, reflex telling him to help his friend, stop that agonized scream, pull him back across the plateau and down into the sunshine where he belonged.

"Matty—"

The animal flinched, still making that high undulating noise, confused and hurt. He whimpered, and edged away from Foggy, head tilting everywhere, panting for breath. There was a searing burn on his cheek, near his right eye. Shaking his head, Matt picked himself up—left hand shivering over the floor, useless with the strength of the spasms—and bolted for the stairs.

"No, no, no, Matt, no!"

Matt scrambled up on the closet, over the railing, out the door, and right out of Foggy's life. And Foggy gave chase, of course he did, but the roof was empty, and the streets were empty, and Matt wasn't anywhere. Matt wasn't _anywhere_.

_(I'll always come back to you.)_

And because life hated Foggy, really _really fucking_ hated him, the flare burned the apartment to the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _No matter how many times that you told me you wanted to leave..._  
>  _No matter how many breaths that you took, you still couldn't breathe..._  
>  _No matter how many nights that you'd lie wide awake to the sound of poison rain..._  
>  _Where did you go? Where did you go? Where did you go?_  
>  30 Seconds to Mars


	4. if i had a boat

Foggy sat on the twisted wreckage of a taxi and stared at the pile of dust and smoking ash that used to be where he lived.  Everything he'd managed to grab before scrambling out was piled messily next to him: his rifle, his duffel bag with his medical supplies, the half-bottle of bleach Matt had brought back, the satchel, and a bag of food and water that was ominously lightweight.

He rubbed at his neck, over the raised furrows of the scratches crisscrossed over the skin there, some of them scabbing already.  Matt had scratched him before and he'd been fine, so he figured these wouldn't transmit the sickness, either.  It didn't really matter.  He was pretty much done.  With everything.

There wasn't any more tears in him to cry, and he worried that if he started up again, he'd dehydrate faster.  He wasn't sure if it was possible or not.

Foggy rolled the dog whistle between his fingers.  He'd brought it to his lips throughout the day, but never blew into it, pussying out at the last second every time.  Yeah, he could call Matt, and Matt might come running, and then he might strangle Foggy to death with that horrible rictus snarl on his face.  And he wasn't sure he wanted that to be the last thing he saw.

He got to his feet and gathered his things into Matt's shitty satchel.  Pulled it onto his shoulder with the rifle and the duffel, and kicked a couple of balled-up pages of magazines out of his way as he stepped away from the remains of the apartment.

He started walking.

\---

_Apartment 6A had a pretty great view of the chaos that erupted from the sky and poured down into the streets.  Foggy stared out of the windows, trembling.  It was like that bullshit with the Avengers all over again, but with a lot more fire.  And darkness.  And screaming._

_And a_ lot _less Avengers._

_Matt was leaning his back against the wall nearby, arms pressed back against the brick to hold himself up, head bent.  He was pale, shivering, and hadn't said much, not after the phone call, not after the sky had been torn in half.  Not after the fire started._

_Foggy had managed to grab three gallons of water and a twenty-four pack of bottles.  He didn't ask how Matt knew that this was going to happen.  The answer was probably going to make it worse.  He asked something else instead.  "Did you get a hold of Karen...?"_

_Matt looked like he was going to puke.  "...No," he whispered, shaking his head marginally.  His head tilted softly; agony crossed his face.  Was he bleeding?  Had he gotten hurt before Foggy showed up?_

_"...Hey," he reached over and touched Matt's shoulder.  "You okay, buddy?"_

_"..._ No _," was Matt's answer, leaning away from Foggy's touch.  He pushed his hands hard into his face, leaning over himself.  "I'm not.  I'm really, really not."  Slowly, his legs buckled, and he ended up sitting on the floor with his back to the wall._

_Foggy sat down next to him, his heart already pounding from the fuckfest going down outside, speeding up as he watched Matt slide down to the floor.  He glanced over him, quickly, but couldn't see anything but the shivering.  "Shit, dude.  Did you get hurt?"_

_Matt blinked hard, and started to shake his head but something shrieked outside, either a dying woman or something much worse, and he flinched, bringing a hand up like it could buffer him from the sound of it.  "It's..." he took a breath, shook his head again—he was_ crying _, why hadn't Foggy noticed that—and crushed his palms into his eyes._

_Something turned over in Foggy's head.  "...You can hear them, can't you?"_

_Matt's face twitched as he pulled his hands away.  He answered slowly, wet eyes tilting around before sliding up to the ceiling, as if in prayer.  "...Yes.  I can hear them."_

_"How many?"_

_"...All of them."_

_All of them.  The aliens, the screaming, the people, the fire, the destruction._ All of it.

_He couldn't save any of them.  He couldn't help anyone.  If he went out there, he'd be just as dead—but he should have tried that anyway, because that was who he was.  Something was keeping him_ here _, in the apartment._

_It took Foggy an embarrassing amount of time to realize it was himself._

_So he reached out without thinking, grabbing Matt's hands, trying to guide them to—something, he didn't know, he was still figuring that bit out—but Matt yanked them back, hissing, shaking his head, pressing his hands to his ears, but it didn't help, because it never did, not since he was nine years old._

_"I can't—" he coughed out the noises, barely words.  He was breathing hard, now, trembling all over, unable to process all the sounds, all the pain, all those poor fuckers that he wouldn't ever be able to help.  "Fog—Fog—I can't li—I can't_ fucking— _"_

_Scattered, not knowing what to do, Foggy panicked.  He reached out and grabbed his friend again, yanking him close, crushing him as tightly as he could in his arms.  Matt bucked, startled, disoriented by the sounds outside and the feelings inside and the sudden weight of Foggy all over him._

_"No, no, Matt, hold still, stay here."_

_"I can't—Foggy, I can't—you need to—"_

_"Stop, stop, stop.  Shh.  Shh, Matty, shh."_

_Matt was strong, all muscle, all power—but it was all gone._

_He went limp and weak in Foggy's arms and sobbed into his chest, so hard his entire body shook with it.  Then he started screaming, in pain and terror, at himself, at the world, at the people dying all around them.  His city,_ his _city.  Foggy held him and held him and didn't let go, he never let go, not until the sounds had finally died and the fires were burning out and everything became so, so silent around them._

_The sun rose.  The sky was grey-green.  The city smelled like burnt tires, burnt plastic, burnt flesh, burnt_ everything. _Foggy stared out the window at it, holding Matt in the same position despite how agonizing his muscle cramps were.  Matt had stopped screaming long ago, now just weakly sobbing.  His city._ His city.

_Dead.  Burnt to its last in the middle of the night, while they shivered and hid, cowards, cowards.  Matt cursed everything.  Himself, Foggy, the city itself, the fire, his own God.  Everything._

_A part of him died that night, too, seared to white and swept out on a breeze through the darkness.  A part of him died—and another part took its place.  It wasn't until the sickness took hold in him that Foggy figured out what._

\---

It was cold at night.

Foggy climbed into an overturned SUV, shutting the door behind him, and curled up on the worn fabric of the ceiling, tugging his bags close and his rifle closer.  None of them made him feel any warmer.  He hadn't brought any blankets.  They'd been the first to go up in flames, anyway.

He huddled up into himself, alone, and ignored the roar of his stomach as he shut his eyes and tried to sleep.  It never came.  There were sounds, outside, in the street.  Distant chittering, footsteps in their echoes.  A faraway roar.  Nothing that he recognized.  He listened, because he had nothing else to do.  He wondered which noise would be the thing that came to kill him.

Something came close, once, near dawn.  Whisper-quiet, padding around outside the SUV, hopping once on top of it, before fading upward.  Onto a building.  Foggy kept his face hidden in his arms, and didn't look to see what it could be.  Who it could be.  He wished it was Matt and prayed that it wasn't.  He didn't want to see him again, didn't want to look into that twisted face and see the animal again.

Foggy crawled out of the SUV late in the morning, far after the sun had risen.  He stretched his back, feeling exhaustion heavy in his whole body.  The rifle felt like it weighed ten more pounds.  Every inch of him felt like it weighed ten more pounds.  He sighed, and rubbed his face, and kept walking.

\---

_Matt never went out after dark.  He'd done it once, only._

_Because that night, that single night where Matt had let his confidence outweigh his practicality, Foggy had been jerked from a doze by a weak whistle outside.  He'd climbed the stairs to the roof, and stepped out the door just in time to see Matt pull himself over the edge—slowly—and collapse in a pile on the faded, warped flooring.  Blood_ everywhere _._

_Every inch Foggy had to cross to get to him felt like a city block.  "Oh_ Jesus, _what the hell happened?!"_

_Matt couldn't talk.  His mouth was full of blood, and his nose was spraying blood with each heavy, jerky breath, and when he tried to spit out words, they were blood, too._

_Foggy picked him up, brought him inside.  Lit the last two candles they had and trembled in the dark at what the weak light showed him.  Gashes, like he'd never seen, burnt black on the edges, half-cauterized, all across Matt's chest.  One, on his gut, had gone too deep._ Far _too deep.  Something pale, and not at all flesh-looking, was trying to come up out of it._

_"Don't you fucking die on me, you asshole, don't you fucking die, you don't get to do that."_

_That was his mantra.  The entire night.  He pressed sterile gauze into the wounds with one hand while keeping steady pressure on the_ bad _one with the other, kept both eyes on Matt's chest and waited for him to take that last rattling breath and expire right there on the floor._

_He didn't.  Finally,_ someone _was listening to Foggy's bitching._

_The only thing that saved him that night were the wounds themselves, the minor ones (_ minor _, what a fucking joke) because he'd tangled with an alien and fucking lost, lost_ hard, _but they were strange creatures, with strange body chemistry, and a strange way of burning whatever they touched when they swung out with those odd blue-hot claws.  Without that, he'd likely have bled out before ever reaching their apartment._

_Foggy used the last of his stitches to close the hole in his friend's stomach.  The feeling of_ pushing his fucking intestines back inside of him _with the last sterile gloves they had would never leave him; he would remember it until the day he died.  Stitching his abdominal wall back together with only the light of two shitty candles to guide him, however, was his crowning achievement in medicine._

_Matt woke up,_ finally _, two days later.  It felt like two goddamn years.  His eyes rolled around and he took in a shaky, weak breath and immediately vomited black, gritty blood and phlegm all over the fucking place.  Half of it in Foggy's lap, because it had become his semi-permanent pillow during_ this _grand adventure.  Black and gritty, like coffee grounds, which meant it was old, not red and fresh—a good sign.  He found it was funny that any sort of blood-vomit could be a good sign._

_"You're such a fucking asshole," Foggy said, cleaning off Matt's face, and Matt gave him a trembling, weak grin, then clutched at the pain in his gut caused by the puking.  "You are so not fucking allowed out after dark again."_

_His eyes fluttered.  "'S always dark," he coughed out, trying to be clever, but then he sneezed the dried blood out of his nose with a harsh jerk and a disgusting noise.  All over Foggy's face.  Of_ course.

_"I don't know why the fuck I put up with this."_

_"My sunny personality," Matt breathed, so weak, lifting one quaking hand to seek out the one Foggy had on his shoulder, digging his fingernails gently into the back of it.  "...Thank you."_

Go fuck yourself with that genuine bullshit, Matt.

_"Don't thank me.  Just stay the fuck away from those guys from now on, Jesus."_

_Matt hummed something vague, tilted his head down, and fell asleep.  It took a week before he could walk again.  Foggy dragged him every step of the way._

\---

He walked north.  There wasn't any smoke anymore, but it was the only place he knew of that might have other people, so he had to go there.  It was that, or die in the street.  Looking at the Hudson, he regretted thinking of throwing himself in.  It bubbled and hissed black at the shore and smelled like all the death that had ever happened in the world.

Foggy rolled a bottle of water in his hands as he walked, staring down at the dust under his feet.  He was distracted, yes, and he knew it, and he knew it was a dangerous thing to do, but God, he just _didn't care_.

He crossed under an old overpass, then through a building that'd lost half its walls.  The remaining two rose up on either side of him like a canyon.  Foggy considered drinking the water, but didn't.  Conservation.  There wasn't a lot left, and his throat wasn't dusty to the point of coughing yet.  He could wait.

A loud clanging noise behind him made him jump, dropping the bottle in the dust as he turned, yanking the rifle off his shoulder in the same motion.  Matt would have been proud of that one, he thought.

The building was empty as he doubled back toward the noise and took a look around.

"Hello?" he called, dully, like he was answering a too-early phone call on a late morning.  "Matt?"

No answer.  Of course.  Matt was never going to answer him again.

Foggy turned and stepped back out into the sun.  It was hot, sickly green, as alien as the little shits infesting the city at night.  He swung the rifle back over his shoulder and kept walking.

There was a sound, far above him, in a busted building, something like bare feet running on a cracked concrete surface.  He decided he'd imagined it, and kept moving.  The Hudson stretched along beside him, all dark and death-scented.  He followed it north.

\---

_Foggy woke up in pain and wasn't sure what the hell had happened.  This wasn't a common occurrence.  He tried to suck in a breath, but it was halting, and excruciating.  It went in halfway and came right back out as a shivering groan.  Something else chased up after it, against his will, from his gut, through his throat and onto the ground.  Pure liquid fire, if he had to describe it._

_"Okay, okay, okay, shh, shh, it's okay, shh," a voice was hissing into his ear.  He followed the sound of it to a body that was pressed harsh against his back, trembling.  A firm hand against his stomach, keeping him bent double over himself and facing the ground.  "More, Fog, you need to get it all out."_

_Two strong fingers in his throat, very suddenly, and his stomach lurched again, and_ more shit came out of him, _splashing on the dust below, stinging in his nose.  He tasted blood and something bitter.  His chest screamed in pain.  "The_ fuck, _" he tried to say, but all that he could get out was more black shit._

_The body against him shifted.  An ear against his back.  "Hold still, Foggy, hold still."  He followed the order.  Heard a slow, in drawn breath that made him think, reflexively,_ concentration _, although he wasn't too sure why.  He wasn't too sure about anything right now.  "No, no, there's still more, Fog, I'm so Goddamned sorry about this."_

_Those fucking fingers tried to come back again, and he bucked and twisted on instinct, but then the other hand moved from his stomach and gripped his jaw, hard, like set iron, and he couldn't fight it— "Foggy, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I don't want to do this—" and the fingers were in his throat, so fucking strong, and he heaved again.  A splash on the ground.  Where the fuck was all this shit coming from?_

_Again, he dry-heaved, and the head on his back, the humming silence._ Concentration. _"Okay.  Okay, good, I think we got it," said that voice, soft and rushed, in his ear.  A hand rubbing his stomach carefully.  He could feel the strength in the fingers that had been walled off, expertly gentle.  "Just breathe, Foggy, okay?  You're doing good.  Breathe for me."_

_Who the hell?  Foggy wracked his brain for a name, a face, any sort of memory, but it was all fuzz and blur, and he couldn't put two things together.  Another hand on his back now, rubbing in time with the other one._

_"You scared me so bad, Foggy.  You're so brave, Jesus Christ."_

_He really wasn't.  He knew someone who was way better at it than he was.  Who was that guy, anyway?  And who was the guy that was talking to him?_

_Slowly, he focused.  The dusty ground was beneath him, now splashed with a concerning amount of gritty black water.  It looked like water from the river, the Hudson—_

_The river.  A bridge.  A shout.  One misplaced foot.  Blackness._

_There was more, but he couldn't be sure if it was a dream or memory.  A voice, shaky, terrified.  A mouth on his own, breathing for him, hands on his chest, pushing and pushing, fingers in his mouth and knuckles in his stomach.  Soft, desperate sobbing._

_"...Matt?" he asked, voice breaking in half._

_"Yeah."  The body against his back leaned harder into him.  There was a shake—a slight laugh, full of relief.  A quiet, strained voice.  "Jesus, you scared me to death."  Foggy believed it.  Matt sounded like he'd just been strangled._

_"What happened?"_

_"You fell off the bridge."_

_Foggy groaned, pushing the hand off of himself as he moved into a sitting position.  Matt followed, giving him a long, dead stare—focusing with his ears, not his eyes—before dropping his hands into his face and hissing out a sigh.  He was covered, head to toe, in black shit.  On his skin, in his clothes.  Foggy realized that he was doused in it too, and a huge puddle of the same shit was pooling underneath him.  "What the fuck?"_

_"You drowned, Fog.  You drowned.  You were dead."_

_"What the_ fuck?"

_"I, uh, I did CPR.  You swallowed a lot of that shit from the river."  Matt was pushing his hands through his hair.  It was so long now, curling at the base of his neck.  He'd done a mismanaged job of getting the river off of his face.  He dragged in a shaking breath, eyes fixed on the ground, eyebrows crumpled.  "Foggy, I heard your heart stop beating."_

_Well, it was definitely beating_ now, _so Matt must have done_ something _right.  He usually did.  He always knew what to do.  "...What the fuck," Foggy huffed again, unable to come up with anything else, and he put his face in his hands, exhausted._

_"Yeah.  Yeah, 'What the fuck' is a good way to put it," Matt said, the curse sounding strange in his mouth.  He grunted and got to his feet, trembling all over.  "We need to move.  Can you stand up, Fog?"_

_Foggy didn't know if he could.  He reached out anyway, and Matt grabbed his arm and hauled him, easily, to his feet, looping Foggy's arm over his shoulder to help.  His shoulders were tense, raw iron, underneath his ruined clothes, but he carried his friend without a single complaint._

_"I'm a little distracted right now, so you gotta make sure we don't fall into any open manholes, okay?"_

_"No manholes," Foggy repeated back, feeling his head loll on his shoulders.  "No manholes, and definitely no more fucking rivers."_

_He couldn't see Matt's smile, but he could feel it.  "Atta boy.  Let's go."_

\---

Foggy rested in the shade of a twisted, black tree, next to the Hudson, picking idly at the label on the Planters Peanuts bottle.  He was glad he'd taken the time to purify some of the water before they'd gone to bed, before Matt had woken up in the middle of the night and tried to kill him.

He could still feel the fingers on his throat.  He could still feel that hot breath, the shift of air as teeth snapped shut inches from his face.  He could still hear the roar of the machine.  It was all so clear, like it had just happened minutes ago.

His stomach churned like he'd eaten something expired, but he hadn't eaten anything at all.  Foggy put the bottle down on the rocks next to him and leaned back on his arms, staring at the sky.  No clouds today.  There were rarely clouds at all.  He shoved his hand into his pants pocket and took out the thin silver whistle, twirling it between his fingers as he laid himself down and studied the burnt limbs of the tree above him, the way they leapt across the grey-green backdrop like a spiderweb.

"I'm tired," he mumbled, like someone was listening.  They weren't.  He was alone.  "I don't know if I want to keep going."

The tree rattled above him in a minute breeze.

Foggy ran a fingernail over the planes and valleys of the whistle.  He stuck it in his mouth but didn't blow on it.  Pillowing his head on his hands, he laid back again.  He wondered how long it would take to get Matt's attention if he started now.  He wondered where Matt even was.  Was he eating?  Was he hurt?  Where was he sleeping at night, or did he sleep at all?  His circadian rhythm had been looped to Foggy's—would he even realize he had to sleep?

He sighed a breath through his noise to avoid blowing into the whistle.  There was no use worrying.  Matt wasn't going to come back.  All he could do was hope he didn't run into him again, because he knew he would falter at the trigger like he had last time.  He wouldn't be able to shoot him.

Foggy sat up, swallowing the groan of pain that tried to come up out of him.  He pulled the whistle from his mouth, rolled it over in his hands, and watched the tainted sunlight flicker, green and orange, off of the silver surface.

He threw it into the river, and kept walking.

\---

_He'd never seen anything scarier, and he'd watched aliens rip through his sky twice, watched fire spill down from above like rain, watched the entire city char and blacken and stumble to the earth, dead._

_Matt was standing, a dozen feet down the alley, over a twisted, broken body, a body that_ he'd _twisted and broken, heaving for breath.  His face was pale, rage pulling at his expression in all the wrong places, eyes fixed to a point, teeth flashing in the light as he took in heavy chestfuls of air.  His hair flicked in the breeze and curled around his face, catching that reddish tint in the sunlight that made it look like fossilized fire._

_Foggy stayed where he was, clutching the rifle, panic attempting to pull him in forty different directions, all of them further away from his friend.  Instead of choosing one, he didn't do anything at all, standing as still as possible like he was under the gaze of an animal that would pounce at the slightest bit of movement.  Maybe he was._

_The bite had happened two weeks ago, and while the wound had healed, the sickness remained.  Foggy had almost started to feel brave enough to think Matt might have taken a pass on it, that it hadn't transmitted through the wound, but that was wrong.  Dear fucking God it was wrong._

_"...Matt," he hissed, finally, and the man in front of him canted his head, listening.  He looked like a wild animal.  A rabid dog.  Pushed into a corner, terrified, furious._

_Foggy licked his lips, tasted the dust and ash, and took a step forward._

_Matt growled,_ growled, _nothing like how he usually would, that low grumble of noise that was scary but still_ human— _this was a different creature entirely, rattling up from his chest, a warning, a threat.  A deep and terrible machine._

_"Shh, shh, it's just me," he responded, on reflex, like Matt actually_ was _a fucking dog.  "Matt, it's Foggy.  Don't you know who I am?"  He gripped the rifle tightly.  His heart was somewhere partying it up with his tonsils.  He wasn't getting a response._ "Matty."

_Then, all at once, the expression was swept from Matt's face, and his body relaxed all over, like he'd suddenly fallen asleep, and he dropped, boneless, to his knees, panting for breath.  His head rolled laxly as he tried to focus; his fingers twisted into the dust underneath him.  He was pale—_ paler— _and a tremble started up through his slim frame.  Foggy approached slowly, watching the shiver get stronger and stronger, watching Matt's face twist in confusion, eyes fluttering, jerking all over the place._

_"Hey, buddy, it's me.  It's Foggy, okay?"_

_Matt jolted in surprise, like he didn't know Foggy was three feet in front of him.  He should have.  He should have been able to sense him from ten blocks out.  "Gh," he said, and it took Foggy a long moment to realize Matt had been trying to say his name, and had faltered on the first syllable.  Matt shook his head heavily, reached up to paw at the sweat on his face, and made a high sound, bewilderment and fear, a noise he'd make when he woke up from sedation, like he didn't know where he was, or what was happening._

_"It's okay, it's okay, it's just me."  Foggy set the rifle down carefully into the dust, pointing the barrel away from them.  "Matty?  Can you talk, man?"_

_He tried.  His soft voice slurred and stumbled all over itself.  "I—mm—_ ugh. _"  His dry tongue darted out to wet his dry lips.  He let out a breath, took in another, and finally blurted, messily, "What d'fuck happened?"_

_"I have no idea."  Foggy inched closer, reaching out.  He paused when he recalled the heavy jump from a few seconds earlier.  "I'm gonna touch your forehead, okay?"_

_"M'kay," Matt breathed, tilting his head down, as if to make himself an easier target._

_Foggy placed the back of his hand against Matt's forehead, and God, he was so_ warm _.  Warmer than the heat of the alleyway could have made him.  That wasn't good._

_Matt leaned into the touch with a muffled noise in the back of his mouth, tears in his eyes, throat working as he tried to get words out.  They didn't come.  He shook all over.  His left hand shuddered hardest, at his side, fingers twitching in the dust.  Matt took a breath, coughed.  Finally figured out how his tongue was supposed to work.  "I don't... how did..." his eyebrows drew down and together, "...when... when'd I get—?  Where am I?"_

_"The alley.  We've been here about the last forty minutes.  Looking for water, remember?"_

_"...No," Matt said, tilting his head upward, and his face was lost and afraid._

_Foggy had no choice but to look at it.  He spoke quickly because he didn't want to see it for another second longer.  "Hey, okay, buddy, we need to get back to the apartment."  They needed to get back two hours ago, before he'd been jumped in this damned alley and Matt had come roaring in like the late C train.  "Can you get up for me?"_

_Matt shifted.  Pawed at the ground, tried to push himself up.  Whined.  "No."  A low sob broke from his throat, confusion harsh in the dust over his face.  "Foggy.  How—how—how did I get here?"_

_"Don't worry about it.  Come on."  Foggy brushed a hand up Matt's arm to tell him he was there, then took his hand and dragged him up out of the dust and blood.  He weighed so little.  "Grab my elbow, yeah?"_

_Matt did, and his fingers clung hard, tight, desperate._

_It took Foggy four hours to get them back.  By the second hour, Matt had trouble keeping his feet under him, so Foggy made him ride piggyback, and it was a clear indication of his friend's state of mind that he didn't argue, or stubbornly refuse, or simply sit on the ground to wait for his own strength to return.  Matt lost consciousness around hour three, breathing in short little gasps in Foggy's ear as they got to the last street before the apartment.  Up the six floors of creaking, winding stairs.  Inside, where it wasn't any warmer, where Foggy carefully lowered him to the floor, onto the blankets.  Matt slept there, unmoving, for twelve hours.  Woke up in the middle of the night, disoriented, struggling to talk, left hand spasming, terrified._

_A week afterward—four days after he'd come back to some semblance of himself—Matt came home with a green spiraled notebook and a pen.  Told Foggy to write down what he saw, like he was some kind of test subject, to try to help anyone else that had contracted the sickness.  Foggy asked if it would help him, and Matt told him that he wasn't sure anything could._

_It happened sixty-seven more times after that._

_On the sixty-eighth, he didn't come back._

\---

He was getting closer to where he'd seen the smoke, or at least he thought he was.  Late in the day, he crossed into Central Park, or at least the ashes it had left behind.  The pond was black, the grass was black, the trees were black.  A fire had burned through here that first night, and nothing had ever grown again.

No, the only green Foggy got to see now was the tint that the sky now had.  That, or labels, or the rare can of green vegetables that Matt always hogged.

Foggy was so hungry.  All the food was gone, and he was total shit at finding more.  It was impossible when everything was covered in ash and dust, and he was never sure if he was digging into a kitchen or the remains of a car or a twisted bundle of desiccated bodies.  His sense of smell was shit, especially after he'd been trudging around in it for a week.

Was it a week?  He'd counted seven sunrises, but after running out of water, he may have lost track.

His fingers burned for the whistle.  He wanted to see his friend again.

Matt would kill him, he knew.  His teeth would reach his face this time, not like all those repeated memories of the rooftop.  They looped over and over in his head, and he couldn't turn it off.  It would hurt to get bitten, but he wouldn't care.  He just wanted to see him, to know he was okay, because Foggy certainly wasn't.

"I've only been alone a week, Matty, and I'm already falling apart," he mumbled.  The wind answered him, kicking up ash, blowing it against his face.  He shut his eyes reflexively.  "I told you I'd be useless without you."

He let out a breath, staggered to a bench that listed on one side, and sat down heavily.

How far off was he, now, to that smoke?  How far had he gotten?  New York wasn't all that large of an area, when it came down to it, but he was so _slow._  He couldn't run around on rooftops and sprint for hours at a time.  It just wasn't in him to do it.

_God_ , he was hungry.  He chewed on his thumbnail, tasting sweat and blood and dust and ash, bitter as anything.  At least it was a sensation, something other than the metallic taste that the lack of water was leaving on his tongue.

"It's not even dark yet.  I'm tired."

Foggy pushed his hands through his hair.  Too long, too filthy.  He was sure he had nits again.  Matt, somehow, always avoided them, but it was probably his senses.  He could probably _hear_ them crawling over his skin.

But at least the nits were something _alive,_ unlike the city that stretched in front of him and the will that crumbled inside of him.

The wind blew harsh at his back.

He huffed out a breath and got to his feet.  "Okay, okay.  I'm moving.  Jesus."

\---

_"Stop fucking fighting me, Matt, I need to—_ ow, _you_ asshole!"

_Matt was pretty fucked up.  (When was he_ not _fucked up?)  Okay, more than usual.  Foggy was fairly sure Matt's arm shouldn't be bending that way.  He was also fairly sure his arm wasn't in its socket anymore.  And that he was bleeding out from a gash that went deep into the elbow of the same arm._

_His best friend was the biggest fucking idiot.  Who the hell walked on a fucking crane suspended between two sideways buildings, anyway?  Matt probably would have been okay, if not for the gust of wind that knocked him off, down to the street.  He'd made a really gross sound when he hit that speed limit sign with his fucking_ arm. _And then, of course, Foggy panicked, and then Matt was panicking because of that, and now they were just in a tangle on the street, yelling at each other, with Foggy trying to get his arm back in and Matt trying his hardest to break free._

_"Get_ off!" _Matt shrieked, twisting and bucking against Foggy's weight on his hips, made wild by pain, and by the sickness, as it dug its claws into his brain and tore it in two.  It had been eight months since he'd caught it.  Pain and stress and panic gave him spells—pushed him up onto a plateau of fever and disorientation.  This was one of those times.  Worst possible moment for it to happen.  "Off!  Get off of me!  Get off!"_

_"Nope, nope, not happening, you're staying down—"_

_Matt snarled—less human, more animal—and swiped out again, catching Foggy in the chin, actually cutting with his nails this time._

_"Fuck!_  Matt! _Knock it off!"_

_Jesus Christ,_ this man. _Foggy pushed down on Matt's shoulder with one hand—the good one, he wasn't a total douchebag—and started digging through his duffel bag with the other.  He grabbed a handful of individually-wrapped syringes, isolating one, ripping the plastic covering open with his teeth.  Foggy held it in his lips as he went for the tiny glass vial wrapped in protective Post-It notes._

_Matt saw the needle—or heard it, smelled it,_ whatever— _and snarled again, trying to knock it out of Foggy's mouth, but Foggy had a lot of practice at this.  He leaned away, humming loudly through his lips._

_"No, no, I don't want that, I don't want that," Matt cried, his furious snarl tilting down into a high, frightened whine.  "Please, please, don't do that, don't give me that."_

_Foggy had already made up his mind.  He'd done this more than once.  He tightened his teeth over the needle cap and pulled the syringe out of it, jabbing it into the vial, pushing down on Matt's chest with one knee as he drew up a dosage with both hands.  "Hold still," he grumbled through the needle cap._

_Matt's fear switched right back into fury and he lashed out again with the arm that worked.  Sloppy.  He was too far gone, too far into that hole in his head that swallowed everything else.  Foggy knew he wouldn't remember any of this—which was why he was going for the tranquilizer._

_Forty-nine times, now.  Forty-nine incidents, each one more terrifying than the last.  Matt losing himself all at once, the expression slipping from his face, every muscle stiffening, that low machine growl bubbling up from his throat.  Falling into it like a seizure.  It was horrible.  Foggy would rather watch the world burn down again than have to see it:  Matt, roaring, lashing out, striking anything that came near him, including Foggy, if he got too close, too brave._

_It was their worst fucking enemy._

_Foggy yanked the needle out of the vial and came close with it.  Matt freaked, bucking desperately, that sharp whine overtaking his snarl again.  Screamed, "No!" over and over and over but Foggy steeled himself, blinking the tears out of his eyes and mumbling a sobbing apology.  He moved his hand to Matt's other shoulder, the injured one, pushing down, cutting off his friend's terrified shrieking with a sudden pain that startled and stilled him with a sharp yelp of agony.  He stabbed the needle into Matt's leg at the same time, depressing the plunger, praying he'd hit muscle._

_Fuck, he hated this.  It was the worst thing he'd ever had to do, but it wasn't even the first time.  That had been in their apartment, after some alien shrieking in the distance triggered him in the middle of the night and it was the only thing Foggy could come up with to stop him from running out there and getting disemboweled again.  Eight more times since then.  Including now._

_Matt wasn't even the one who'd found the tranquilizers.  He would have avoided them.  Foggy had dug them out of the rubble of a vet clinic.  Ketamine.  He'd shoved it into his pocket and stashed it away and was infinitely glad he'd done so._

_"Okay, buddy, shh, shh, it's okay, it's okay," Foggy whispered, a constant babble of attempted comfort.  It never helped.  "Just sleep, Matty, just sleep.  I'm gonna take care of you."_

_Matt was crying.  Confused.  "I'm sorry," he murmured, eyes flicking around in all directions, trying to understand what was happening.  He couldn't.  All of this was just a howling hallway of pain and sound.  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."  He would say anything to prevent himself from slipping into that warm, uncomfortable pit of anesthesia.  It never helped._

_"I know."  Foggy hated watching this, but he wouldn't pick himself up off of his friend's body, because the last time he had, Matt had bolted and ended up faceplanting into a fucking car when the drugs caught up with his head.  (He laughed about it later, but cried for an hour when it happened.)  "You're gonna be okay, buddy."_

_Foggy got a front-row seat as Matt's sobbing tapered off, words slipping, quiet slurs, out of his mouth, eyelids drifting half-shut because his eyes didn't know it was all going dark.  He watched his best friend slow to a shivery stop, waiting for his eyes to stop tracking and go terrifyingly still, which they did.  They always moved so rapidly when he was stressed or panicked or in pain, and they'd become Foggy's own little way to judge just how deep into the drugs Matt was._

_Right now?  Totally buried.  He might have given too much.  Matt's drug metabolism had always been inconsistent, but now—he blamed it on the sickness, tossing his neurological pathways into disarray—it was all over the goddamn place.  Certain things took hold in minutes and didn't let go for hours and hours.  Some things just didn't touch him at all._

_Ketamine, though,_ ketamine _knocked him flat on his ass.  Foggy was just glad he had something, some sort of outside help, a tool that could be used whenever Matt was more dangerous to himself than anything else.  The memory loss—from both the sickness and the drug—also helped.  The occasional hallucinations from it did not._

_Foggy climbed off of his friend, sighing, rubbing the tears out of his eyes and off of his cheeks.  "All right, buddy, let's put you back together," he mumbled._

_He popped the arm back in—fucking gross—then cleaned and stitched the gash in his elbow, the diseased sun lighting his way from overhead.  It wasn't as bad as he'd thought.  There was still a lot of blood, but nothing looked like it would be permanent or crippling._

_And because he wanted to, not because he had to, he picked Matt up out of the dust, tucking his head carefully against his neck, and carried him back to the apartment.  Thank God they were only a few blocks away.  Thank God Matt only weighed about a dollar-fifteen._

_When Matt came out of sedation, like a man pulling himself from his own grave, he was still on the plateau, and it made it worse.  Foggy helped him through it.  He always did.  And Matt, when he was Matt again, thanked him, and thanked him, and thanked him._

\---

He slept in a tunnel in the park.  Strange noises echoed in the night.  Chittering, howling, rattling metal, clicking tree branches.  They were much worse when he was partially in the open.  The apartment was dead silent compared to the racket he was hearing now.

Foggy couldn't sleep.  He hadn't slept in a very long time.

He was too cold and too uncomfortable and too hungry and too thirsty and on top of it all he was too tired to do anything about any of them.  He pushed himself back against some rubble and pillowed his head on his duffel bag.

He woke up sobbing from a nightmare, a roar of a machine and teeth in his neck.  Filthy sunlight poured into the tunnel.  For a long few minutes, he regarded the rifle, wondered how he could turn it on himself and fire it at the same time.

Then he got up and kept walking.

\---

_Somehow it always came back to Foggy pinning Matt to the ground, trying to put something back in or stop something from falling off, while Matt fought and fought to keep him away.  A horribly endless cycle, a crippling addiction, a too-often-visited nightmare._

_They were in a filthy alley packed with filthy dead alien bodies, Foggy grabbing at Matt's head as he scrabbled against the ground, panicking, half because one of his eardrums had been damaged in the blast and half because_ there was fucking shrapnel somewhere in his skull.

_"Stay still.  Fucking—oh my God, Matt, stop_ fucking moving, _I can't see where the blood's coming from—"_

_"It's in my head.  It's in my head.  Get it out.  Please, please get it out."  He was begging.  God, that was the scariest thing to hear right now.  "Jesus, Foggy, get it out."_

_Their panic was feeding off each other, just like the last time, and Foggy tried to keep Matt down on the ground with a hand on his head, like a dog, the clippers vibrating in his hand and already smelling like burning plastic.  There was blood and hair everywhere.  "I can't find it!"_

_Matt was scratching at his head again.  Violently.  He was screeching every curse word he'd ever heard in his life, both English and Spanish.  Blood on every part of him, slicking his hands, painting half of his face._

_"Stop_ moving! _I can't get it if you don't stay still!"  Foggy moved the clippers down again, taking off a huge-ass chunk that was_ nowhere near the wound, _but it wasn't like he could apologize when most of it was Matt's fault.  "There, there, I found it, fuck,_ don't move Jesus Christ. _"  He threw the clippers down and went scrabbling for the tweezers.  "Don't move don't move don't move don't move!"_

_He tried to push his stupid friend's head down again, but the prick bucked on reflex, and Foggy had no worldly clue how someone so slight and wiry could be so strong. He grunted, shoved the tweezers into his mouth, and pressed Matt to the ground with all the weight he had._

_"Sorry, buddy, I'm sorry!  Stop moving!"  Most of his words were muffled.  He'd lost sight of the entry wound again,_ dammit dammit dammit, _and had to get the clippers.  They were still buzzing where they lay in the dust, and he went hunting again, hands shaking like he had Matt's fucking brain disease as he pawed through his filthy hair.  He gave up after two seconds, and just buzzed all the hair off that he could reach.  Matt could grow it back.  Eventually.  "If you don't stay still, I am going to give you the ketamine, so_ stop fucking moving!"

_Matt went motionless immediately, or as much as he could with his harsh breathing and panic.  He_ really _hated the ketamine.  Threatening him with it was a low blow, but Foggy took them when he had to.  "It hurts, Fog, it hurts," he panted anyway, into the dust, blowing it up and creating a fine layer of white and brown over the blood on his face.  "Oh God, Foggy, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that, I shouldn't have gone out—"_

_He took the tweezers out of his mouth, "Shut the fuck up, man," and pressed them into the wound, knowing very well if Matt bucked him again, he could slip and stab his friend right in the temple.  "Fuck, I can't find it."  He_ couldn't find it. _It wasn't under the skin.  His stomach lurched and a hard, rocking sob came out of him.  "I think it's in you, man, I think it's inside."  That's all he could say.  That, and a soft, "Matty."_

_Matt's face, twisted in pain, absolutely crumpled at Foggy's words.  "God."  He licked his lips.  They were all blood and dirt but he didn't seem to care.  "I'm sorry.  I'm so sorry, Fog, I'm sorry."  There was no reason for an apology.  Only someone like Matt Murdock would apologize for_ dying.

_"I know, man."  Foggy said anyway, and sucked in a shivering breath.  Realization sank deep and cold into his stomach, the heaviest thing he'd ever carried: this was the last time he was going to be able to talk to Matt.  The guy who'd kept him safe for two years like it was his mission from Heaven.  Maybe it was.  "Don't move, buddy.  It'll go faster."_

_"I know.  I know."  Matt wasn't writhing anymore, but felt around blindly to grab any part of Foggy he could reach.  His hand ended up on Foggy's arm, and his fingers tightened, and didn't move.  "I'm sorry."_

_"It's okay.  It's okay."  It wasn't._

_"You need to..." Matt's eyes were darting around crazily, mind working as he spat out words carefully.  "You need to leave the city.  You have to get out of here.  It's not safe."_

_"I told you, I wasn't gonna leave without you."_

_"You have to."  Matt's fingers tightened.  "You have to."_

_"I can't... leave you here," Foggy said, not wanting to say the next words, feeling the pain in his eyes as he coughed them out anyway.  "I gotta bury you, Matt."_

_"I don't want to be buried."_

_"Then what?  Leave you here so I can..." he shivered, swallowed a gag, "...see your fucking... your fucking_ body _out here?"_

_"Foggy.  Foggy."  Matt lifted his head slightly, then realized what he was doing and went still again.  He spoke very carefully.  "It's not gonna be me.  You know that."  His voice cracked, but he let out a breath and gathered his strength to talk again.  "I'm not... it won't_ be me _.  You understand?  Just the body I was stuck with while I was here."_

Stuck _with.  Damned to.  Forced to learn to use while everyone else lived normal and happy around him.  It wasn't fucking fair.  It just wasn't fucking_ fair.

_Foggy said so._

_Matt smiled humorlessly.  "We don't live in a world that's fair."_

_"...We live in this one," Foggy finished for him.  Words that felt like they'd first been spoken decades ago._

_"Uh-huh."  A long rattle of a sigh.  "...Hey, Foggy?"_

_"Yeah, Matty?"_

_"...Thanks.  For... for being with me.  Through... you know.  All this shit."_

_"You know I wouldn't be anywhere else."_

_"You've been a good friend.  I never thought I'd have such a good friend.  Did you know that?"  Matt's eyes stopped moving and a sad little smile came over his face.  "Of course you know that.  I don't... I never had any other friends, before.  Or after.  Just you.  It was enough."  He shut his eyes.  "It was more than enough."_

_Then Foggy found the shrapnel in the back of Matt's neck and nearly punched the bastard in the face for his stupid fucking luck and for all the gross, sappy shit the both of them had just fucking said to each other._

\---

He was so fucking tired, so fucking thirsty.  He didn't know how much time had passed, or how long he'd walked.  The food was gone, the water was gone.  He still had his rifle, though, and the two bags.  They felt heavier each day.  Each hour.  Each second.

Foggy picked his way through the park.  All ash, now, all pillars of charcoal stabbing up into the sky, grey and white and ruined.  The smoke from before had to be close, now.  He felt like he'd been walking his whole fucking life.

He stumbled as he reached the other side of the park.  Stumbled again after a few more steps.  Stumbled for the last time after another quarter-mile.  Ended up curled up quietly on the ground, shivering in the mud created by ash and the seeping water of the Hudson.

"Ugh, Matty.  I finally know how you feel," he mumbled into the sky.

He closed his eyes.

\---

_"Ugh, what did you do to my hair, Fogs?"_

_"Shut up.  It's trendy."_

\---

Someone was grabbing his arm.  He jolted, swung out wildly, cried out in fear.  Not a feral.  He wasn't going to get eaten.  That wasn't going to happen.

But a voice answered him, young, eager.  Male.  Not Matt though, too young.  "Hey, hey, dude, it's all right.  I'm gonna help you out, okay?"  Strong hands on his arms.  "Up we go.  Yeah, awesome.  Come on."

He walked, half in a dream.  His whole body felt like dust.  The splinters of the world closed in around him and receded.  A tall chain-link fence rose ahead of him.  He could hear electricity crackling in it.  He lost focus on himself.  Came back around in a grey room with a soft pair of hands and a light voice.  Someone was giving him water.  He drank it greedily— _no, save some for Matt, he's going to need it—_ and cried at the taste of it.  Pure.  No bleach, no bitter particles of dirt.  He must have died.

The world pulsed in and out sluggishly, black water on a shoreline.  Grey walls and a white table.  Voices, someone crying, a dog barking.  The buzz of an overhead light.

"Drink," said a voice, and it was so fucking familiar.  "Drink more, Foggy, come on."

His mind roiled and latched onto the sound.  "Matt?" he asked, but his voice was cracked into a hundred pieces, and talking made him cough.

"No, no.  I'm not Matt.  Drink, Foggy."

He did.  It was so good that he cried again.  Gentle hands set him down and he fell asleep.  He didn't dream.  He wasn't sure that all of this wasn't already a dream.

He slept and slept.  The voice came back.  His eyes were open but he couldn't figure out what he was looking at.  The pathways in his brain weren't there.   _Dehydration, severe,_ something said, and he thought it could have been himself.  That was something he knew, right?

Someone was mumbling in the background, but he was too focused on that soft, gentle voice close to him.  Who was it?  He _knew_ it, didn't he?

"Here.  You gotta drink a little more.  Don't fall asleep again."

He didn't.  He drank until he wanted to vomit.  Kept himself awake.

Life came into hazy, blurry focus.

He was in a room, a _hospital_ room, or as much of one as could be cobbled together in this world.  Shelves with vials and bottles, and a sink that dripped water— _dripped water_.  Like every single ounce wasn't a precious, paramount commodity.  He thought about getting up to capture the drops in a cup, but wasn't too sure he could get his feet under him.

How long had it been?  Everything felt like flash-frozen fire, twisting backwards from where he sat, a long tunnel of nothing that he'd passed through in a dream.

"You're awake," that voice said.  Soft, gentle, familiar.  He jolted, turned to look.

She stood there, next to the door, and stared at him.  He stared back at her.  Bright blue eyes, strawberry-blonde hair—short, now, way too short, like she'd gotten a nit infestation a while ago and had to have it sheared off to get them all out.  Her face was all wrong, hard and severe and lacking that sweet smile he'd kept as a permanent memory in his head.  A scar that started on one cheek and buzzed across her ear, mangling the cartilage there.

She closed the door, crossed her arms, and leaned against the wall.

"Good morning, Counselor," she said, voice humorous, but face unmoving.

"...Hey, Karen."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Burn slow, burning up the back wall._  
>  _Long roads, where the city meets the sky._  
>  _Most days, most days stay the sole same._  
>  _Please stay, for this fear, it will not die._  
>  James Vincent McMorrow


	5. the high road

Karen's life sucked.

It'd been pretty shitty from the start, to be fair, especially before she'd gotten to New York. After that, it got better, but never really _great—_ it was all up-and-downs, an inconsistent series of days that made her want to die and days that made her want to keep breathing.

She loved her job. She really did. She loved the two men she worked for, she loved Foggy's boundless enthusiasm, how he always had a joke ready, always so eager to help anyone and everyone that came through the door. Matt's unending tenacity, always so earnest, waiving fees on clients that couldn't afford it, smiling gently whenever someone thanked him and thanked his law partner and thanked their secretary for all they did for the people of the city. Business was good, after Fisk, after they put their name on the map and their tiny little sign on the front of the building.

Those were her good days, when she would go to work, and everyone was okay, and she would go home and fall asleep with a practiced ease, without the need for a sip from a bottle.

Then there were bad days—she'd wake up from a nightmare, early in the morning, gunpowder on her hands, blood on her tongue, sobbing. Those always days ended too late with too much alcohol.

She hated it. She hated when Matt would come in late, a poorly-concealed scrape on his face and a hitch in his step, moody and quiet. She hated when Foggy came in looking just as bad, usually shaky on too little sleep and too much coffee. These two events coincided a lot more than she was comfortable with. Karen stopped bringing it up after a while, because Matt would bristle, get moodier, and not talk to her for a while, and she hated that. There was something frightening about him, something she could never really place but never really scared her enough to stay away.

When these days happened, Karen kept to herself, worked quietly, went home without saying goodbye to them, and it became her norm, when it should never have gotten that far to begin with.

But... none of those days were as bad as _that night._   When they'd caught the sun in a bottle and broken it open over the world. When the fires burned black and never went out. When the streets became ash and the ash became dust and the dust was everything, everything.

She was riding home in a cab—Matt had called it, because he refused to let her walk alone after dark, no matter what kind of mood he was in or what sort of mysterious bullshit he'd gotten up to the night before—and then there was light. Not streetlights, or sunlight—the light of fire, whipping, crackling, spreading across the sky and over the city like paint on a sculpture. The taxi crashed, driver dead on impact. She got out, limping, ripped her heels off, and hid in the subway tunnel, under a train that never moved again.

The night lasted forever. All the other people, so lost and hurt and confused, screaming around her. It was deafening. She cried, too, a harsh heavy thing that came straight out of her gut and spilled everything she knew about herself onto the third rail. Karen died that night, sobbing in the tunnel, screaming for help, and help never coming. A perfect, endless loop of noise.

Someone else emerged in the morning, to a world of silence and stillness. Ash and ash and ash and dust and bodies, so many bodies, so much rubble, so many lives just gone. The others that had hid out alongside her screamed, and sobbed, and didn't know what to do. She didn't know, either. The city had burned to nothing and so did Karen.

There was a rescue vehicle. Civilian. A school bus trying to get out of New York. She climbed inside, the only thought in her head to find her friends, but as they passed by Foggy's apartment she saw it had collapsed, and spent the next three weeks trying to cry. She never did. She forgot what it felt like, and never tried to find it again.

Shock, she told herself, with clinical words in the back of her mind. Shell-shock, that's what they'd called it in the first world war. Rattled so hard that she'd lost a few pieces, down in that subway tunnel underneath a train. She never went back for them. She never wanted to have them inside of her again.

She knew very little about what had happened.

An invasion, clearly, but something had gone wrong. Something reversed in the technology they used to cross over, pulling their sky to her own instead of the other way around, ripping everything apart, burning everything in its howling wake. Sickness and poison spread, also unintentional—another thing that spilled from their world to hers.

A total failure on everyone's parts. Nothing had helped. The rip in the sky closed and everything that crossed over remained. The sickness, the poison, the fire, the creatures. All of them marooned on the black rock they'd turned her world into.

But she'd survived, because that was what she was: a survivor, clinging to life, despite every action that had happened before. The overdose, the knife, the jail cell, the gun and the table and the warehouse. She lived.

Well, she breathed, anyway. Her body worked. Her mind took a backseat. She shoved memories out of her head like she'd shove her hair from her face, ignoring all of it. And, eventually, they faded and fell quiet, and she never visited them again. She had no need for it, no reason to think about what her life had been before all of this. All she could focus on was what lay right in front of her. She called herself something else to help wall off the memories. It was too much of a reminder. Now, every lick of energy in her body went toward breathing, walking, _living,_ and nothing else.

The Bronx shelter became her home. She made acquaintances, but never friends. The connections just weren't there anymore, in her head. It wasn't that she didn't care—she did. She just didn't give enough of a shit to show it, and that became who she was. It was better this way. She was stronger this way. She was _safer_ this way.

Karen died. _Paige_ lived. She picked up a gun, learned she was skilled at it, and the shelter became her home. Her whole life. It was black-and-white, and she reveled in the simpleness of it, and as long as she kept breathing and shooting, she would have her place in the world. And that was fine. If she could ever feel a thing called _happy_ again, the closest she came was her quiet routine in the shelter, the silent, numb aftershock of a thrill whenever she killed an alien—or better, a feral—to keep it from hurting others. The routine was everything to her.

Until Jack had pulled a guy out of the neighborhood near Central Park and dragged him back to her. Severely dehydrated, severely malnourished. Delirious from heat and exhaustion. A skin infection and parasites inside of him, due to the water. Filthy and unshaven and haggard. All commonplace things.

Not commonplace, though? She _recognized him._

"Foggy," she'd whispered, and it was the first crack of emotion she'd had in her voice in two years. She placed a hand on his forehead—filthy, sweaty, scarred—and swallowed. "God." Something rolled in her stomach and made her feel nauseated.

She did not know what it was.

Jack was stunned, not only at the fact she knew the shuddering body he'd plucked out of the city, but at the way her voice and face twisted. It was not like her. It wasn't who she was. "Paige?"

"It's—I know him. Knew him. He was, um—" she blew out a breath. Got herself under control, quickly and easily. "I used to work for him." Good, nice and even speech again. She wanted to scratch the fucking feelings out of herself that were lurking, uncomfortable, in the far planes of her head. They were more alien to her now than the creatures that had dropped out of the sky.

"Wow, really?" Jack asked, helping her as she moved Foggy to a bed in the infirmary. "What'd he do?"

"Lawyer," she said, pushing a memory away.

"You were a lawyer?"

"No, I wasn't." She gave no more information, and went to sink, to get water. Clearing Foggy from the dehydration was more important than clearing the malnutrition. Lukewarm water, not cold. She didn't want to put him into shock.

Her medical knowledge was limited—it wasn't her specialty, not here, not now—but she was still the best the shelter had. The only one the shelter had.

Karen lifted Foggy's head carefully—his hair was long, pulled back into a ponytail, matted and dirty, like the rest of him—and started to get him to drink. He did, thank God, once he realized what was happening, clutching at the edge of the plastic cup with tight, shivering fingers.

She checked his other hand, and it was shaking too. No one-sided tremors. She blew out a breath. Relief. "He's not feral." He was gaunt, unshaven. Bruised and scraped and sunburnt all over, nothing at all like she remembered—or thought she remembered. The image of him had been pushed down and back for so long that she couldn't be sure, but she thought she remembered him being heavier.

"Yeah, I didn't figure. Ferals don't carry guns."

Foggy coughed. She shushed him, ignored Jack's look. "Shh, Foggy, it's okay. Can you drink?" He made a gurgling noise. She pushed onward. "Drink more, Foggy, come on."

He did, swallowing heavily. His eyes were half-opened, unfocused. "Matt?" he asked, voice cracking.

Something shifted, slumbering, in her stomach again. It hurt. "No, no. I'm not Matt. Drink, Foggy." He must have been really out of it if he was asking for that man. She knew Matt was dead. Deep inside the unvisited planes of feelings she could no longer feel, Karen knew. 

It was a thing she had not thought about in a very long time. She used to wonder if Foggy had made it, because he was adaptable, and strong. Matt, though—she never once considered Matt would have survived. It was easier to think of him dead than to think of him struggling, in the dust and the poison. He was tough, yes, and intelligent, but intelligence didn't make up for lack of eyesight.

Karen waved Jack off and went back to her work. She got Foggy to drink, and drink more, but he fell asleep every time she set him down to get more water. He was out of it, and _beyond lucky_ that Jack had found him when he did. How long had he even been out there?

Jack was pawing through Foggy's things. "He's got medical supplies. A _lot_ of them."

It made sense. Especially if he was out here, alone. "Here," she said, lifting Foggy's head again, tilting another glass to his lips.  "You gotta drink a little more. Don't fall asleep again." An order. She was good at giving them.

"Look at all this, Paige. He has _drugs_. Stitches and shit. You sure he wasn't a doctor before all this?"

"No, he wasn't." Just a lawyer. Wasn't he? "Get out of his shit, Jack."

The kid pouted, but did as she asked. Most of the people here did what she asked. Karen was far from a leader, but she had a presence, and they noticed it.

Foggy was asleep again. Figured.

"Jack. Go back out. Make sure there isn't anyone else around the area you found him," she ordered. If Matt was alive— _there's no way he's alive, what are you_ doing—he wouldn't have been far from Foggy's side.

"Yeah. Okay."

She watched him leave, then turned back to the man in the bed. She felt like she was in a dream, lost and blown out in the wind. Had he been in the Kitchen, this whole time? Had he been there when she got on that transport and gotten the fuck out? Had she left him behind, that day?

Questions that she would have to wait to have answered. Karen pushed her hands over her head, feeling the uneven choppiness of her hair. An old reflex she didn't know she still had, triggered by the sight of the man she used to dress up for.  Nobody looked at her for her beauty anyway, not anymore. Not like she had it. They looked at her because she was strong, and didn't take shit, and could take out an alien _at night_ with a _gun_. She was very good at it, and she knew it.

Leaving Foggy on the bed, she waited for the water to bring him out of that arid pit of dehydration and back into consciousness, and went around and started digging through his stuff. Just like Jack said, it was full of medical supplies. Bandages, suture, antibiotics. Sedatives. Why would he need sedatives?

He had some knives, a flare gun. There was a notebook, too, with a green cover. She opened it and flipped through it idly. Told herself she didn't give a shit, that she was curious, but it was another emotion that she wasn't familiar with anymore, so she was just lying to herself.

_year one day ninety-nine/1st plateau_

_disoriented. memory loss. did not remember the past 12 hours. slept for another 12. stupidly accepted a drink of water._

_puked on the bed. tried to eat the pillow._

_what is my life._

What? Karen turned the page. No names, nothing that would tell her who the fuck he was talking about. Was it himself? It was definitely his handwriting, the slanted, messy scrawl she remembered having to decipher when she worked for him.

It looked like a journal, but it was filled with repeated instances of _disoriented_ and _memory loss_ and _headache_ and _fever_. Medical? What the fuck had he been tracking?

She flipped to the last entry, read it quickly.

_year 2 day 34 early morning. 20-25 minutes._

_difficulty with speech. difficulty walking. tremors. immediately slept when home. 4 hours._

_fever. no nausea. no appetite. disoriented. headache._

Year two, day thirty-four—that was recent, if his timeline had started when the sky was opened. Barely a few weeks ago.

Messily, at the very end of the last line, he'd scribbled, _plateau 67._   Whatever it was, he called it a plateau, and he'd gone through a whole hell of a lot of them before getting to her. Some kind of illness? Drug abuse? Withdrawal?

Foggy groaned from the bed, and she should have jumped, but shock was a hard thing to replicate fresh when she'd been in it for so long. She sighed, shoving the notebook back into his bag. Karen went to the door to close it—this was going to be private.

He rubbed his face, grumbling, and sat up, gazing blearily around the room. Surprise and worry came over his face at the same time, and then a little panic. He didn't remember being brought here. Which meant he probably didn't even know _she_ was here.

"You're awake," she said, catching his attention.

Foggy turned to look at her, and everything but the surprise dropped from his face.

Karen shut the door. "Good morning, Counselor," she said, remembering all those early mornings and all those late, late nights that turned into mornings. Remembered shitty coffee and a white cane tapping on the floor. Heard the soft tone the unwanted memories put into her voice. Pushed them quickly out of her head.

"Hey, Karen," Foggy replied, voice faint.

"Well, it's Paige, now. I'd prefer you call me that."

"Um. Okay." He had no idea what the fuck was going on. "What the fuck is going on?" Yep. He pushed himself toward her, trembling, his skin flushed as he slowly came back around to a normal temperature.

"We found you in the Park, just outside. You almost died of dehydration, you know that?" She did not sound worried. She never sounded worried. She never sounded _anything._

"Yeah, I figured I'd come close," he said, carefully. He looked her up and down, all gaunt edges and prickly facial hair and hollow eyes. Half-dead. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"What are _you_ doing here?" she asked, remembering an alley, a baseball bat—fuck you, get out of my head, it's not important. "And I _live_ here." The inflection was a struggle to create and she still wasn't sure it came out right.

"You _live—_ " he huffed, pushed his palms hard over his face, skin hissing over his beard. "How fucking long have you been here, Karen?"

"It's Paige. And... about two years, I think."

Foggy huffed out a bewildered laugh. "Jesus. I sure as hell would have liked to know that two years ago. I've been in the fucking Kitchen this whole time."

"...Yeah, we don't go down there. Too many ferals."

A strange look crossed his face. "Tell me about it. You call them that, too?"

"Well, it's better than zombies."

"They aren't zombies."

"That's why we call them ferals." It took Karen a minute to find out the actual answer—graffiti, sprayed on the George Washington bridge, calling the sick people as much, but by the time she'd found the information, Foggy was talking again, and she let the thought go.

"God. All this time, you were right here in the Bronx? We were such fucking idiots." Foggy rubbed his face again, like he was trying to wake himself up from a deep, deep dream. He turned and swung his legs off of the bed.

Karen frowned. Then she realized she was frowning, bristled at the uncomfortable feeling it put in her, and wiped it hard from her mouth. "'We'?"

"Me and Matt. _God_. Not the best way to learn you've wasted two years of your life living on dust when you fuckers up here have running water." He sounded furious, but his face was twisted in pain. It wasn't physical. She knew what that looked like. "Jesus."

She wasn't concerned about that. She was more concerned about, well, " _Matt?_   He was _with you?"_   But she _was_ concerned, otherwise her voice shouldn't have sounded so alive. It wasn't something that happened often. Karen wasn't sure how to handle it.

" _Was._   Yeah. 'Was' is the key word, here." Foggy seemed to be wondering if he could get himself down to the floor without collapsing. "Not anymore, Kar— _Paige_.  Are you being serious with that, or are you just fucking around with me?"

"I'm serious." She was always serious. "What happened to Matt?"

Foggy turned his head to look at her. His eyes were red, but that could have been caused by anything. She couldn't remember what he looked like when he was crying. Had she even seen him cry? Oh, right, Elena. Everything from before this felt like it had happened to someone else, and she was only experiencing it secondhand. Foggy cleared his throat before speaking. "He died. Obviously." His voice cracked on the second word.

It was not a surprise. It hurt anyway, or at least she thought it did, deep in her gut, like a stab wound. She hadn't felt something like that for a long time. Shaken, she rubbed her face and leaned harder against the wall. "How?" Did she even remember what Matt looked like? His hair was brown, right? She remembered the cane.

Foggy answered slowly, like every word was agony. She concluded that it meant it had happened recently. "A feral. In the Kitchen." Foggy's voice was taut. He looked tortured, like something had been ripped right out of him. "...A week or so ago." Extremely recent. _How?_ "I couldn't do anything. I'm sorry."

She wondered who he was really apologizing to. "Is that why you didn't come up here before? You were... taking care of him?" Only Foggy would damn himself to a life like that for someone. Only Foggy would chain himself to a man like Matt in a world where every single thing you touched was poison. Why?

"Me? Take care of _him?"_   Foggy snorted. "It was the other way around, mostly. I wasn't too good at it. Which is why he's not here anymore." He turned, picking his feet back up onto the bed, giving up on trying to walk or run or whatever his plan was. His face was red but not from the sun. "These guys shot him, you know. Couple weeks ago. He was just looking for help. Other survivors."

"What... out in the Park?"

"Yeah, I assume. I'm the one who pulled the arrow out of him."

Right, medical supplies. Foggy had been using them on Matt, too, apparently. Did the notebook have anything to do with that?

"They must have thought he was feral." She didn't apologize. She would have fired, too, but not with an arrow like Jack preferred. No, she was more of a one-to-the-head-make-sure-they're-dead sort of girl now. "I can't believe he even lived that long."

Foggy was very pale. "He was tough, Karen. A lot of people underestimated him."

And she had, too. Apparently. It didn't really explain anything, though. "How did he even get over here to get shot at?" A fair question, she thought. Overall, she was still trying to accept that Matt hadn't been dead for two years under a collapsed apartment building.

Foggy pressed his lips together. It took him a long few moments to talk, and it was hesitant. "There's... something you should probably know. About Matt." He pushed a hand over his face, shoving the hair off of his forehead. "About... what he did before all this."

"He was a lawyer."

"Yeah, you... might want to... sit down."

\---

Karen sat down after five minutes, head in her hands, trying to calm her racing thoughts. Mostly, it was all loops of _what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck_ and _he's the one who saved me he's the one who saved me he's the one who saved me_. All of the words, all of the shivering emotions, scattered her. Terrified her. She didn't know what to do. She didn't even know what she was feeling. But Matt—

Matt. _He'd_ been the one who stopped the murderer in the apartment, he was the one who'd broken the problem with Fisk wide open, and _he was the one—_

He was the one who'd stopped her from getting _murdered_ in her _apartment_. And now he was dead, rotting, somewhere in the Kitchen. She never even got to thank him. It hurt, and she knew it hurt, and her fury at herself for having the feeling was so strong that she shoved them all away in desperation just to be numb again. The strange, alien emotions clamoring in her head made her feel like an addict that had been off of a drug for too long. Numbness, callousness—those were her methadone. Comforting.

"Jesus," she breathed, but her voice was dull, and she was proud. "Okay."

"Yeah, that was about my reaction."

"So, all that time? Did you know?"

"Nope. Found out by accident. Remember that fight we had? I went to his apartment and he was bleeding to death on his rug. Went out after Fisk after Elena..." His face twisted; it still hurt him to talk about it. After two years of nothing but death and fire. Elena's death _still hurt him_ even after he'd lost everything, Matt included. "Well. It didn't go so well for him. We fought. You know the rest."

Yes, she did. She didn't like thinking about that week. The fading dregs of feeling still left in her from it made her throw up.

Foggy was frowning, staring at the floor, fiddling with the edge of his shirt. The motion looked familiar, but Karen couldn't place it. He talked again, but his voice was much quieter. Mournful. "He... he didn't deserve what happened to him. Out there. He was trying to protect me. And it just..." he trailed off and rubbed his eyes. God, he was _crying._ "It just... _happened._   I couldn't do anything."

Karen hadn't cried in two years. She did not start now.

"He did so much. So fucking much, Karen. Too much. He found food, and water. He could find _anything_." He blew out a tremulous breath, unable to pull his mouth from the frown it was stuck in. "I fucked it up. And now he isn't here anymore."

It finally clicked, in her head: it wasn't part of _himself_ that Foggy was missing. It was _Matt._

"He would be proud of you," she spoke, a shallow repeat of something she'd heard somewhere else. Television? Didn't matter.

Foggy smiled without humor. "Yeah. Yeah, I know. And he was. He was so fucking strong, Karen. I don't..." he sighed again. Sniffed. "I don't know what to do without him."

Another quote. A movie, she thought. "I'm sure he would want you to keep going."

"He would. I just don't know if I can."

Karen still wasn't sure what to do. She'd never been really good at this sort of shit, even less so now, when every moment of every day only let her focus on the right now, the _is there food_ and _is there water_ and _am I currently being attacked by something?_   Out of practice, she fell quiet again, rubbing a scratch on her chin.

Foggy buried his face in his hands, shivering.

Co-dependency, Karen thought, in an attempt to steer her mind away from herself. Common, now, in a world like theirs. Foggy was so reliant on Matt, for one reason or another, that having him gone was tearing him apart. Like an addict ripped from their vice. Karen knew about it, about relationships like that, but had never felt it, and was terrified just to see it. As if it were _contagious._

She would never be that weak. She would never allow it.

Foggy wiped his eyes again, pulling his hands from his face and resting his chin in them with a sigh. "I wish I would have listened to him and come up here. He would have been so happy to see you again. Or as much as he sees." It sounded like a well-worn joke, but his voice was low and wasn't a nice sound in her ears. "God. I don't know what the fuck to do, now."

"I can't decide for you."

"No shit, Paige."

A smile tried to get across her face as he called her what she preferred to be called. She smothered it before it came to life. "We have supplies here. You're welcome to work for them."

" _Work_ for them? What, are you serious?"

"Yes." Again, always serious. "We don't give shit away. That's suicide."

Foggy blew out a breath, raising his eyebrows. A familiar face: bewildered, surprised, irritated. "Wow. Are you sure you're Karen? Because you really don't seem to give half a shit that your friend's dead."

"I'm not Karen, I'm Paige."

"This again. Changing your name doesn't change who you are, don't you know that?"

Of course she knew that. Of course she did. "I'm sorry about Matt." The words left her mouth like any others, empty and even.

Foggy laughed. She couldn't hear humor in it. What did humor sound like, again? "Nope, too late for that now. I guess this shit really does change all of us, doesn't it?" He finally gathered up the strength to get down off the bed, clinging to the side for a moment before pushing himself away. "Matt died out there, and you're just sitting there nodding. He was your friend. He missed you. If he would have known you were here..." he sighed. "We were all he had."

"I know."

"Then maybe, I dunno, feel sad about it? That stonewall shit is freaking me out."

Karen frowned. A frown was okay, she thought. Irritation was okay to show, right? "I do feel sad." No, she didn't. She couldn't feel anything. It hadn't been a problem for her until right this minute. "What are you gonna do?"

"Right now? Right now, I'm going to take a leak. Next, well, I'm not sure. I hear Boston is great, this time of year." He shrugged heavily. "You obviously don't want me to stay, so I'll just move on."

"What makes you think I don't want you here?"

"Um, I dunno, the fact that you look like a fucking statue sitting there, not giving a shit? It's actually making me more nervous. Are you an alien in human disguise?"

"No." She let out a breath. This had never backfired on her before. She didn't know what to do. "I'm not." He was angry that she wasn't upset about Matt, angry that she wasn't happy to see him. She was. She _thought_ she was. Karen just wasn't too sure she knew what _happy_ felt like anymore.

Foggy paused at the table to paw through his things. "You didn't take any of my stuff, right?"

"No." She turned her body toward him as he moved. "What's the notebook for?"

"Nothing you'd give a damn about."

A strange, sharp feeling roiled in her stomach. Something she used to only align with indigestion or nausea. She wasn't too sure what it was. "Okay."

Foggy scoffed. "'Okay?' _Really?"_   He turned to face her. "What the fuck happened to you, Karen?"

"The world happened."

"Don't give me that shit. That's something Matt would say." His expression faltered again. He kept opening that wound, the one torn across his mind, the loss of his friend. "What actually happened? What did that to you?" He spoke earnestly. "Can I help?"

God, she actually believed him. "No."

Foggy's face twisted. He crossed his arms and leaned his lower back against the table. Thoughts crossed his face as he worked something out in his head, quickly and methodically like the lawyer he'd always been. His expression settled on something soft and so, so sad. "How bad are the nightmares?"

Karen's thoughts slowed to a confused stop. Nightmares? No, they weren't nightmares. Nightmares were frightening. These were commonplace. They happened every time she slept. Even if they woke her up every night, panting into her pillow, layered images of death and the faint smoke-wisp memory of the smell of rot clouding up in her head.

She didn't answer him.

So he spoke again. "Maybe you could talk about it? Matt has... _had_ them, too. Me, to a lesser degree. It always helped Matt to talk about them. When he was brave enough to. It helped." 

Karen swallowed a scoff. _Everyone_ had nightmares. _Everyone_ had horrible memories. She wasn't special. None of them were. "I don't want to talk about them."

"You don't have to. I'm just offering." Foggy pushed his hands into his pockets, rolling his head on his neck and staring at the ceiling. He was looking better, at least. A lot less flushed. "And it'll help. Trust me, it'll help."

"I'm fine."

"Oh, of _course_ you are." That was definitely sarcasm. He blew out a heavy sigh. "I gotta go, Paige. I'm glad to see you, but I can't hang around in a city where my only two friends are dead."

"I'm not dead." She tried to frown again. "Were you even talking about me?"

"I was talking about Karen." He turned his head and gave her a look. It was too complicated for her to work out, so she didn't even try, but his voice shivered as he spoke. "You don't have to stop breathing to die, you know?"

She did, and she didn't. She wasn't too sure what she was feeling, but it was definitely _some_ kind of feeling, alien and painful, somewhere so deep inside herself even she couldn't reach it. What was she supposed to do? "Foggy—"

"My friends call me Foggy. You can call me Frank."

"Frank," she corrected, and his face twisted again, and confused her even more, "I don't think you should leave. It's dangerous, and you might dehydrate again." Now even _she_ could hear the dull quality of her words. Karen worried at her lower lip, baffled.

Again with that strange, hollow little laugh. "I'll take my chances." He shook his head and started stuffing his things back into his mangled knapsack. "Congratulations on the water, by the way. I'd ask if I could bring some with me, but I know I'd have to  put in hours, and I'm not sure I can afford the time."

"I'll give you some," she said, a little too quickly. Desperation. "I've got some things I can..." she wondered what the fuck she was doing, this wasn't like her, this wasn't _safe,_ "...give you. Some of my stuff."

"Yeah?" Foggy paused for a moment. "Are you trying to get me to stay, right now? Because you don't have to try to pay me or con me into it. You can just fucking ask." He rubbed his face, and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Karen, I get it. I understand what kind of shit you've gone through. So did me and Matt. The only reason I'm not... like you? In your... state? I had him. I had someone. And you look like you really need someone right now."

No, she didn't. Yes, she did. Caught between the two options, she froze up.

" _Karen._ Do you want me to stay?"

She chewed on her lip some more. Maybe tasted blood. Her voice sounded tiny and weak and she had to stop herself from wanting to strangle it out of herself. "Yes. I do."

Foggy gave her a smile, lifting his hands. "See? Not so fucking hard, is it?"

She supposed not. Karen fell quiet, not sure what sort of response would satisfy him.

He bailed her out from having to formulate a response. Whether it was intentional or not, she didn't know, but she was still relieved. "I wasn't joking about taking a piss, by the way. Where's the bathroom?"

\---

Foggy was one hell of a medic.

Karen had nearly come to that conclusion on her own, after seeing the amount of supplies in his bag, the sorts of things she didn't even know were used in medicine. Sutures and sedatives were one thing, but a syringe with a tube attached that was created, specifically, for getting fluid out of chest wounds? How had he even picked it up?

She didn't have the chance to ask him anything about it, because later that evening, another occupant of the shelter dragged himself in from the Park, bleeding all over the place. He had gashes across his back that had opened a window to view his actual fucking muscle structure from the outside. No burns on the edges. Fucking ferals again. Karen had seen wounds like it before, but she'd never been able to fix them. Jack had brought the guy in with total panic, both of them screaming, and dropped him on a bed. Foggy had been resting on the other side of the room, and lifted himself up.

Karen got a towel and tried to stop the bleeding. She was the best they had. Her sutures always sucked and _always_ tore open before the wound was healed, and she'd lost two people because she hadn't been able to flush infection out of a wound correctly. Their deaths never reached her, though.

Jack was sobbing. "Oh, Jesus Christ, Bri, Jesus, just hold on."

Right—the guy currently bleeding to death, that was his cousin, Brian. Or, at least he'd told everyone Brian was his cousin. It didn't really matter when he was dripping blood all over the floor and screaming his head off and probably about to die.

She was replacing one of the towels to sop up more blood when Foggy barged in at her left and edged her out. "You're gonna make it worse," he said, his voice sharp. "Don't use towels. Use pack gauze. You have some, don't you?"

"Uh. I don't, um..."

Foggy rolled his eyes, taking the towel from her hands, and snapped his fingers before pointing across the room. "Get my bag."

She did.

It took him forty-five minutes, but he put Brian back together, started a fluid drip to level out the blood loss, and totally stomped the fuck out of Karen's limited skills with his expertise without even really trying. He did all of it like he'd done it a million times over already, with a level of calm precision that she'd only seen in herself when she was behind the barrel of a gun.

"Jesus, dude, where'd you learn to do all that shit?" Jack asked later, sitting on the edge of Brian's bed.

"Here and there," was Foggy's reply. He gathered his tools and pulled a metallic container from his duffel bag, putting the clamps and the scalpel and whatevers inside before adding water and a splash of something from a tiny white bottle. Sterilization.

"I was just using bleach for that," Karen said.

"Ah, no, you don't want to use bleach. It'll rust out your tools. This shit—fuck, I can't remember what it's called, but Matt hunted it down. It's like, medical-grade super-bleach." A weird expression crossed his face. She guessed sadness, and was wrong, because he laughed instead. "He thought it was something alcoholic. Gave it to me for my birthday."

A feeling bubbled up in her stomach that she swallowed down. It was a laugh of her own, she figured out, belatedly. She hadn't laughed in a very long time. She couldn't even remember the last time she wanted to. "You guys cared about birthdays?"

Foggy shrugged at her. "Yeah, why not?"

Karen crossed her arms. She couldn't come up with anything else to say, and frowned. Her stomach hurt.

"So, where's your doctor? Nurse? Who does all the medical work around here?"

She pinched her eyebrows together and raised her hand.

Foggy let out a scoffing laugh. "Really? There's nobody better than...?" He could have said something extremely cutting, but he did not. Instead, he shrugged again. "Look. I know you can't figure out how to ask me to stick around, but this? This is something I can do. This is really _all_ I can do. How often do people get injured around here?"

"Daily," she said, staring at the floor. She felt ill.

"Aliens?"

Finally, something she was more comfortable talking about. "Ferals. There's a bunch of them out in the Park. They, uh. They congregate. You didn't see any on your way up here?" Did he even remember going through the Park? He'd been half-dead when Jack found him, after all.

Foggy chewed his lip and shook his head. "No, I didn't see any at all."

"You've got a guardian angel, then, because walking through there is suicide. They're like fucking cockroaches out there." They didn't breed, at least, or she didn't think they did. Mostly they fought with each other and tried repeatedly to get through the electric fence. Idiots. "Don't know how you managed to slip past all of them." It really was amazing, she just couldn't figure out how to dig the buried feeling out of herself and translate it into speech.

"Hm." There was something else on Foggy's face, now. Totally indecipherable. Maybe a little worry, or a little exhaustion. Then his lips twitched into a tiny smile, and the expression was gone. "Maybe I do."

Karen didn't know what to think of it, so she didn't think at all. "Thanks. For..." she gestured to Brian, still dozing on the recovery bed.

"Yeah? You think I worked hard enough for a few supplies?"

She tried to smile. It faltered. "I think so."

He didn't mask his disappointed expression, but spoke lightly, anyway. "Awesome. Anything to eat? Maybe a bed to sleep in? I haven't slept in a bed since..." he trailed off, and sighed. "Anyway. I'm sure whatever you have is better than what I've been using the last week or so."

Karen thought for a minute. "Yeah. There's an empty room on the other side of the shelter. Christopher... he used to live there."

"Uh, he doesn't live there _now_ , right?"

"Oh, no." Her tone was clear, empty, factual. "He died last week."

Foggy's eyebrows went up. "Uh, he didn't die _in the room_ , did he? 'Cause that would be... yeah."

"No. A feral."

"Jesus. You're having a hell of a problem with them, aren't you?" There was something on his face and in his voice that shifted his tone up just a few decibels. "How many are out there?"

Karen leaned against the sink. "I'd ballpark it at around fifty."

 _"Fifty?_   Where are they coming from?"

She didn't know, so she shrugged instead of saying anything else.

"You said they congregate. What, like a pack of dogs?"

"Yeah."

"Christ. Matt and I never... we never ran across anything like that. Never anything bigger than a group of four or five. And that was _rare_."

Karen crossed her arms. Talking was easier when the conversation wasn't turning its spotlight in her direction. "They get a pack mentality. Eric thinks they have alphas, like wolves, or lions or whatever. There's a big fat fucker somewhere out there that all the others seem to follow around."

"Oh, yeah?"

She nodded. "It's killed four of us already. Christopher included.  Smarter than the rest, I think, but they're all fucking imbeciles." Karen could hear the weak, sputtering fire in her voice, now. "I'm usually the one who goes out hunting for them, but I'm—I was—the only one around who knew how to put a stitch in, so..."

"Wow. You really hate them, don't you?"

No. She didn't. Hate was an emotion. "They've killed a lot of us, and they're contagious. They steal and butcher and _rape_. They're just... _animals_. Is there anything about them _not_ worth hating?"

Foggy got that weird look on his face again, and stared at the ground for a while. "No. I guess there isn't." He rested his elbows on the table behind him. "Is that what put that scar on your face?"

Karen reached up to touch it: the harsh, deep valley carved through her right cheek and across to her ear—what was left of her ear. It was mostly twisted cartilage now. She often forgot the scar was there. A bubbling memory of screaming and blood and _pain and terror_ hissed at the back of her mind. She ignored it. "Yes." Her voice was even, which meant her mind was even, and that couldn't change, not right now. "A year ago."

"It didn't heal right. Who put you back together?"

"Nobody," she said, and clamped down on the memory, pushing it down into the deep emptiness in her head that it was trying to climb out of.

"Oh."

"Yeah." She blew out a breath. This conversation had gotten far too tiring. "You want me to take you to your room, Fo—Frank?"

He frowned, chewed on the inside of his cheek, and nodded. "Yeah, Paige. That'd be nice."

\---

It wasn't much. Four walls and a tiny bathroom shoved into one corner. A scrawny desk with one leg shorter than the others. There was a cot folded in against the wall. A single squat window was across from the door, looking out into the courtyard.

Foggy walked inside and placed his things on the table, frowning as he set his palm down on it and felt it wobble. "Kinda cramped."

"Yeah, it's all I have right now."

He wandered around slowly, checking it out. Tested the window, but it didn't budge.

"It's sealed. Keeps out the poison and the smell of the river."

"Okay." Foggy wandered to the bathroom, peeked inside.  His jaw dropped. "Is that... is that a fucking _shower?"_

The corners of Karen's mouth itched. "Yeah. You get ten gallons a week. Use it wisely."

"Oh, God, fucking _awesome_." He leaned against the wall, looking momentarily upward, as if thanking a higher power. "Matt would have..." he trailed off, and a frown overtook the joy on his face. A short sigh came from his mouth.

"Would have what?"

"He would have killed for this. I mean, literally. He killed a _lot_ of aliens."

Karen leaned against the wall. "Oh, yeah? I prefer the high-caliber rifles myself. They're fast little fuckers."

"Nah, Matt can't— _couldn't—_ shoot a gun. He stabbed them, mostly."

 _Stabbed them?_   With _what?_   "Um."

Foggy's frown shifted into a wide grin. "I told you, he was a badass. A really fucking crazy badass. Can't tell you how many he took out with just a piece of rebar and his ninja skills."

"Ninja skills?" she echoed, scratching her neck. Skills or not, he'd have to be totally fucking insane to take on an alien in hand-to-hand—hand-to-claw, whatever—combat. "He ever kill any at night?" Now _that_ would be an achievement.

"Oh, no. Fuck no. The one time he tried, he came home with his intestines hanging out."

Karen scoffed. "Yeah. Okay."

"You think I'm joking, huh? I could tell you stories about that guy that would make your skin crawl. Some of the crazy fucking shit he's done."

That dark place in her head shifted again. She wanted to throw up. She was tired of this, of her brain trying to blanket everything with feeling, and her, unable to comprehend just what any of them were.

So, of course, she misstepped, and dug herself a deeper fucking hole to fall into. "You could tell me later." Where the hell had that come from?

Foggy's grin fell into a soft smile. "Sure, Karen. I wouldn't mind."

Her lips were still itchy. She said goodbye and spent an hour trying to rub the feeling off of them with her hands and a half-empty bottle. It took her two hours to realize he'd started calling her by her real name again.

\---

Early in the morning, Karen sat on the watchtower—a toll booth, actually, just re-purposed—and stared out into the staggered charcoal columns of the Park, watching. Her rifle was leaning against her shoulder and she chewed idly at her fingernails. The sunlight burned sickly green as it came up over the remains of the city, casting long, thin shadows across the ground.

She loved this—as much as she could love anything—loved to keep watch, alone, in the calm silence of the shelter compound before everyone got up and everything got loud. The solitude. Killing a feral or two, if they got too close, was just a really great bonus.

The air smelled like rotten things and burning plastic, familiar and comforting. A soft breeze picked up from the direction of the river, a welcome brush of cool air against her skin. It'd been far too warm lately.

Movement drew her eye to the trees, and she had her rifle in her hands, lifted, before she even confirmed anything visually. She shifted and placed the barrel on the old piece of railing they used as a gun rest, leaning forward to stare down the scope. Two forms buzzing around between the trees, about a hundred yards out. She loosed the safety catch, rubbing her finger lightly along the trigger guard. A lover's touch, someone had said to her once.

At first, they appeared to be hunting together, desperately scrabbling for any sort of animal that could be caught and eaten. There weren't a whole lot. One or two rabbits, maybe. A few birds. Usually, they turned on each other, and that just made her work a whole lot easier, if not a lot less satisfying.

Apparently, that's what she was going to see right now, because the feral in the back caught up with the one in the front and threw it face-first into the mud. Both of them were filthy, clothes threadbare, gaunt and sickly. Male. She couldn't make out any other details from this far away, but she could make out their actions.

The one in the back—a quick motherfucker, she noted with a frown, was it a new one?—leapt forward and drove its foot into the other one's spine, hard. It looked like it hurt like hell, and she wondered if it'd been enough to paralyze it.

Not quite, because the one on the ground hopped back up, and she imagined she could hear that low horrible snarl they created as it whirled and attacked the quick one. And, well, the quick one was pretty fucking quick, hopping back a few feet, striking out with a leg, throwing its opponent right back into the mud again.

She watched the quick one surge forward once more, pouncing and pushing the first one into the mud. It held the other one's head down in the bubbly mix of river water and ash and charcoal. Karen felt the bare whiplash of giddiness as she watched the quick one drown the other in the mud, slowly, over a couple of minutes. Always good to see. Fun, if she could describe it. The only fun she'd ever have these days.

When the quick one got back to its feet, shaking the mud off of itself, she raised the rifle and squeezed the trigger.

It should have blown the feral's head clean off. It was a perfect shot. Instead, the little fucker dropped low to the ground, rolled to one side, and darted off, disappearing into the trees. She couldn't believe its luck.

"Next time, asshole," she breathed, jerking the bolt back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _It's too late to change your mind._  
>  _You let loss be your guide._  
>  Broken Bells


	6. last night, i dreamt...

Foggy wasn't adjusting as well as he'd like to.

He'd been welcomed into their little congregation. There weren't many people _—_ Matt had been correct in his initial observation _—_ three men and four women, but the dog was gone now. His room was stark, bare. The cot was more uncomfortable than the floor of the apartment, but it didn't really matter. He didn't sleep much anymore.

But these people needed medical help, they _needed him_ , and if there was something he was good at, it was stitching wounds together and stopping bleeding, so he did it. Keeping Matt's insides on the inside for three years had really paid off. They fed him, and enjoyed his company, but he didn't care. It felt like the whole world had been yanked out from under him.

He wanted his friend back.

He dreamed of it, every night. Every fucking night. Approaching Matt on the roof. Sometimes, in the dream, Matt turned and he was himself, grinning easily, saying something Foggy would never remember once he was awake. Most of the time, though, he was the animal, and Foggy would wake up sobbing, clutching himself because he had nobody there to anchor him.

He wanted his friend back.

Sometimes, he would linger around the fence line, listening to the electricity hum above him, and stare out into the Park. He imagined he could see that splintered group of ferals out there, and sometimes, when the light was right, he imagined he could see his friend as well, maybe for once in his life welcome in the place he'd ended up in.

The days passed him by. They turned into weeks, into months. There were attacks, from the Park, and Foggy always checked the bodies afterward, both hoping and dreading that he'd find that scrawny form in the burn pile. He never did.

He lost weight. His health slipped through his fingers like dust. He fell ill often, but he didn't care. He never wanted to leave his room anyway. Karen didn't seem to notice, or give a shit. She spent most of her time firing potshots at the ferals in the woods, like that was the only thing she knew how to do now.

Fucking Karen. She was fucked up worse than Matt had ever been. Emotionless. _Empty_. The world had torn itself through her and left only her shell behind. She didn't laugh, she didn't smile. When she talked, it was always so dull, like she was only barely conscious. And, fuck, that hurt, too.

PTSD, probably, severe. It had crippled her. She wasn't even Karen _—_ right, _Paige—_ and she was barely even _human_. But she spent time with him, even if she couldn't appreciate it, even though it was physically painful to see the million little traumas lingering on her blank expression. The ones that had destroyed her from the inside out. His chest always burned with a deep pain when he saw her.

She slept with him, but it was joyless, silent, only the noise of their skin slicking together and breathing to remember it by. Karen never stayed, and always left right after. She never said much, ever. Everything that made her _Karen_  was burnt black and buried down deep where neither of them would ever be able to find it.

A virus had taken Matt from him, but the _whole world_ had taken Karen away.

It hurt to see the face that he remembered so vividly _—_ grinning or laughing or with a soft smile hovering around her lips or a twisted expression as he told a really bad joke _—_ remain motionless no matter what he said. Whenever he'd throw her a lame joke and she'd just stare at him, like he'd spoken it in a foreign language. God, it hurt.

Not as much as Matt did, though. He felt like he'd lost a vital part of himself on that roof and in that fire, and then carelessly dropped more pieces in the dust as he'd migrated north. He didn't know what to do. That had been Matt's job, and he had no idea how to pick up the slack he'd left behind. Even after three months, he was still working on reflex, on habit, the only thing truly keeping him around being the fact that he was helping others to try to avoid the same shattered life that he was suffocating in.

"I miss you," he would breathe into the dark, in the middle of the night, and he'd always wait for the answer, like Matt would slip out of the shadows one day, grin, and throw paper at him, like nothing ever happened. "I hope you're okay."

God, he just wanted his friend back.

\---

Foggy understood now why Matt stared off into space so often. It didn't take much for his thoughts to whisk him away on a capsizing boat of memory and sound. He fidgeted a lot. He knew who he'd picked it up from.

"Yo, Nelson."

The voice roused him, and he blinked a few times, lifting his head. Had he been in a conversation? No, he was still in the infirmary, staring blearily at some medical text, barely reading, never retaining.

"Huh?"

"Did you hear what I just said?"

Foggy frowned, turned in the chair. "No, sorry. I must have checked out for a second." He'd been checked out for the last _three months_. He could barely believe so much time had passed. He could barely believe he'd lived this long without his friend at his side.

Oh, right, someone was talking to him. Jack, the kid from Queens. Hell of a shot with a bow. He was probably the one who'd put the arrow in Matt all those ages ago. The feathers were still red.

Foggy never offered to go hunting with him or Karen or any of the others. It was a _sport_ , here, going out into the Park, hunting and slaughtering the ferals that lived in the ricketed ruins of the trees. They _compared their corpses_ like hunters did in the world before this one, arguing over who had squeezed off the most skilled shot or who'd gotten the biggest kill.

He never asked about it, when they came back, but he always searched Karen's face, hoping for a sign that she'd seen Matt, or killed him, so he could finally get around to finishing his stupid fucking life without the constant choking worry that his friend was suffering out there. She never said anything, and rarely _looked_ like anything, not even after wiping out a half-dozen of the things.

" _Nelson_."

Oh. Yeah. Talking.

Foggy lifted his head again. "Sorry. Yeah?"

"Those guys from Yonkers are coming in today, remember?"

He didn't. "Yeah, I remember."

Jack rubbed his oily face. "Well, they just called over the radio. One of them's hurt."

Foggy felt his eyes tilting upward, but didn't quite take in the image they were pointed at. "Ferals?"

"When is it not fucking ferals? They fucked up their truck, too."

_Truck?_   The word roused him. People still _drove?_   Where were they getting the gas? And where the hell were they going in a car? Was there even anything to see outside of the city? "When?"

"About an hour ago."  Foggy checked his watch _—_ late afternoon.  "They'll be here in a couple minutes. They're gonna need your help, man."

Right. Because now he was the only one around that knew how to make a flutter valve or where to apply a tourniquet or how to stop intestines from falling out. That last one was hard.

But he'd always liked to help people, hadn't he?

"Okay. Should I meet them out there?"

\---

When he stepped outside, he grumbled at the cold, pulling his coat closer around himself _—_ _Is Matt cold? Has he got something to keep him warm?—_ the sounds of shouting drew his attention to the fence line. He could hear something, a noise he hadn't considered in years. A car engine.

Specifically, a diesel truck, idling in the courtyard. There was a massive scrape on one side, punching the door into the frame. The windows had been broken out and blood dripped in thin lines down the sides, little bar codes of humanity.

Foggy got himself to the truck, adjusting his medical bag on his shoulder.

Someone was crying, soft and low underneath the noise of the engine, and he stepped around the back of the vehicle to find a woman bent over, a man underneath her, pale and still in the graying grass and ashen mud and a bright, bright red puddle of blood. He hurried over, putting his duffel bag on the ground, giving the man a quick check over _—_ no.

No, he was too late. Another missed opportunity in a life full of them.

He sighed, pushing a hand down his face, turning slightly to the woman that was standing a few inches away, sobbing, face in her hands. It hurt to listen, to hear the total crushing loss in the high timbre of her voice. It hurt because he'd felt the same way for three fucking months, he just couldn't cry as hard.

"I'm sorry," he said, tightening his hairtie. "How did...?" he trailed off gently, wanting more information, hoping to coax it out of her.

She took a long few minutes to remove her face from her hands, but her expression was crushed, devastated. Foggy didn't like seeing it. He would have never been cut out to be a doctor in the last world. "One of those _things_ in the woods," she managed, voice twisted and choked by her sobbing. "It ran in front of the truck, and I told him to swerve, but he... he hit it anyway, and..."

Foggy reached over and ran a gentle hand over the deceased man's face, closing the eyes, wiping that horrified expression of death off of it. His stomach churned.

"...I don't think he killed it, it ran off, but then another one came out and..." she let out a harsh, quaking breath. "It was the big one. They warned me about the big one, and we didn't fucking listen. It wanted our supplies. Our food. Marco tried to shoot it, but it just took the gun. Broke it in half."

Right, the big fucker that they rarely got to see, but whenever they did, it was a fucking disaster. Foggy had only got a glimpse of it once himself, and only because he was outside of the fence trying to get someone _inside_ the fence before they bled out in the mud. It'd made a rush at him, all clumsy muscle and anger, but Karen had been up on the tollbooth with her rifle and tagged it in the shoulder. It hadn't come back around after that. Smart.

"What's your name?" he asked, staying crouched, not wanting to step away from the body like it didn't matter (it didn't to him, but it would to her) and upset her further.

"Deborah. Deb. Everyone calls me Deb."

"You get hurt?"

"...No. Just my arm. I cut it on the window, trying to..." she fell into silence, knowing it didn't matter. Foggy knew he was watching a person whose whole life had just crumbled in their arms. He could relate.

"Wanna come inside? So I can take a look at it?"

It took her a long time to nod, weakly. She bent down and pressed her lips to the dead man's _—_ Marco's _—_ forehead, sobbing once with a harsh noise. Then she stood, and stepped toward him, and he straightened up and took her hand and led her carefully back to the shelter.

Jack gave him a look of appreciation and thanks as he took the woman away from the body. Foggy just gave him a short twitch of a nod. He was good at this. He knew what he was doing. And, well, they still needed to clean up the car and get rid of the man's corpse, and he certainly didn't want Deborah to have to watch that shit.

If there was one thing he wanted, _needed_ , to do, it was prevent people from enduring the same bullshit he'd gone through. To protect them from seeing their loved ones dead. Marco was already gone, of course, but she didn't need to see the body, just like Foggy didn't need to see the animal left over after Matt died on that roof.

_I'll always come back to you_ , said that soft voice in his head.

Lying motherfucker.

\---

The next morning, there was a twisted-up corpse of a feral sitting just outside the fence, two broken halves of a rifle laying on top of it. Foggy nudged it with a foot, noting the amount of rigor mortis, while Karen paced around with her rifle tight in both hands.

"Well, this is fucking weird," she said, in that dead, empty voice of hers.

"No shit. This ever happen before?"

"What, a feral dropping out of the sky with a broken neck, out of nowhere? I wish."

Foggy rolled things over in his head. He had theories, but he coveted them greedily inside his head. All of them were wishful thinking, anyway. Anything could have happened here, he tried to tell himself. This could have been a territory squabble or a fight over the gun. Even though ferals didn't use guns. The tremors prevented most kinds of detail-oriented, coordinated hand movements.

But he couldn't help remembering news footage from two years ago, from an eon ago, of criminals tied and beaten and left on the steps of the police station like poorly-wrapped birthday gifts. Gifts wrapped by a blind guy.

He helped her carry the body to the burn pile, and tossed the broken gun in with it.

\---

It happened again a week later, after Jack nearly lost two fingers to a feral wildly swinging the limb of a tree at him. They found the same feral the next morning, with its neck broken, laying twisted up in a pile near where they found the first. The tree branch was stuck in the mud next to it like a flagpole.

\---

Honestly? It was freaking Foggy the _hell out._

He sat on his cot in his room later that night, staring into the weak light of the electric lamp he'd been given, picking at a scratch on his face, thinking. Two halves of his mind fought with each other. One side knew who was doing it, knew who was leaving them dead fucking ferals like Christmas presents. The other side steadfastly denied it, because that person was _dead_. He was _dead_ and nothing was bringing him back.

Still.

Foggy flopped over on his back, sighing. He tried to sleep, and didn't drift off for hours, and when he woke back up it was early, pre-dawn, and it felt like he hadn't even shut his eyes. It was a cycle. He wasn't sure he'd slept more than a few minutes at a time since Matt died.

_Died_. Foggy frowned to himself when he realized how long he'd been mentally describing his friend that way. How little time it had taken him to get used to it, and how little it now affected him when he thought of it.

He rolled over, and stared at the faded bit of light coming in through the window.

_Still._

\---

Two days later, Jack and Deborah came back from a patrol in the Park, pale and shaken. Foggy checked them over and put Jack on the table to stitch together a gash on his shoulder. It wasn't bad. The kid had gotten far worse. Both of them were bruised and exhausted, but alive, and looking like they'd seen the sky rip open for a third time.

"You gonna tell me what happened?" he asked as he wrapped the suture around the forceps to tie it off.

"One of the ferals, man," Jack ground out, eventually shaking his head. Foggy tutted at his movement, and he obediently went still. "It fucking _saved us_."

Foggy's thoughts stuttered to a dizzying halt. "What?"

Deborah was a bit more cogent. "One of 'em snuck up on us. It had a knife. Nailed Jack, pushed him down, went for me." She was chewing on her cuticles. "Then... another one showed up. It was really fucking fast. I thought it was coming for _me_ , but it didn't even fucking touch me, it just wanted the other feral."

He bit down on his tongue to keep himself from saying anything, glowering at how his hands shook while he continued with the sutures. _It's not him. It's not him. He is dead. He's been dead for months._

"It _—_ Frank, it attacked the other feral. Beat the fucking shit out of it."

"Fucking insane," Jack supplied, helpfully. "Brutal."

"It snapped its goddamn neck, Frank. Right there, right in front of us." Deborah let out a shivering breath. "Threw the body down and stood there staring at us. It was fucking _creepy_."

Foggy squeezed his eyes shut to get the moisture and warmth out of them, glad that he was hidden behind Jack. There was no way he'd be able to explain away that reaction. "Uh, what'd you... what did it do after that?"

"Jack shot it."

"In the leg. Arrow. I had another one ready, but it took off. We didn't track it. Because of my shoulder, obviously." He blasted out a loud breath. "You ever hear of anything so fucking crazy, Frank?"

_Yes. Yes, he had_. "No." _Stop thinking about it._ "...Maybe it's the same one leaving them laying around the fence all the time." _It's not him. This is stupid. Matt is dead. Matt is_ dead.

"Really? You think so?" Jack laughed, jolting Foggy's workspace, then went still again at Foggy's grumble of irritation. "Sorry. I just... I don't know, man. I didn't know what to do. It didn't even attack us, it just fucking stood there. Like it was waiting."

His heart was pounding in his ears. He felt dizzy. "What'd it look like?"

"Muddy," was Deborah's first word. All of them were muddy. Not specific. "I don't know. It was male. Kinda shoulder-length hair? Dark-colored. Brown, maybe?"

Had Matt's hair ever gotten that long?

"Um, skinny, you know? Most of them are, but..."

Matt was skinny. He'd always been slender, but now _—_

No. _No._   Matt was dead. This was idiotic. Foggy was being really, really stupid just fantasizing about this shit. It was going to get him in trouble. It was going to get him _killed_.

"It had... its eyes... it had a scary look to it. Worse than the rest of them." Deborah waved a hand in the air. "I don't know. I'm not good at this shit. It was... real intense. When it looked at you. Like it could see everything."

Foggy cleared the lump out of his throat with a low cough. Not Matt. Not Matt. The feral they were describing could probably see, and Matt couldn't see, Matt was blind, _that is_ not _Matt, what the fuck are you thinking, Nelson?_   "You're lucky you got away from it alive. It broke another feral's neck, what could it have done to you?"

Deborah sighed, staring at the floor. "I don't know, Frank. I just... got a feeling from it. Like it didn't want to hurt me. Like..." she forced out a quiet laugh, shaking her head. "It's stupid. It was probably trying to bait me closer."

"That's why I shot it," Jack said, hissing as Foggy's needle went back into his skin again.

Foggy didn't apologize. His mind raced in tight circles. "You think you killed it?"

"Oh, hell no. Just wounded it. Took off quicker than you could believe." Jack fell silent, gritting his teeth at the next pass of the needle. "Jesus, Frank, what are you doing back there? I want my shit on the inside, not the outside."

"Sorry," he grumbled immediately. "Not on my game today."

"Well, get on it! Should have used the Novocaine."

"We're out," Foggy said quietly, leaning in closer and wiping the blood from the area with a piece of gauze between his pinky and ring fingers. "Be glad I have the shit to close this up, Jack."

"What, you need another medical run?"

"I've needed one for two weeks, but you guys keep going hunting instead." He kept the irritation out of his voice. They were gunning really hard for the big one that lived out there. It'd killed far too many people. Just one death would have been enough for Foggy to drop everything, but it was approaching the half-dozen mark now. Where did ferals even live? Where did they sleep? Where did Matt _—_

He hissed out a sigh and clenched his jaw. _Stop. Jesus Christ, just stop._

"Okay, we'll go in a few days. When you clear me for work again." Jack yawned. "I should have brought the machine gun. Would've loved to pour a magazine into that damn thing."

Foggy felt a twinge of something in his chest. Worry. _Fear_. Worry for a _feral_ that was probably just another crazy _feral_ , it wasn't Matt, _Matt was dead_.  He was having protective urges for a fucking monster that lived in the woods and attacked the people he'd come to know at the shelter. A monster that, even if it was still Matt's body, _wasn't Matt anymore._

God, he was stupid. He opened his mouth, anyway. "You think it'll survive the arrow?"

"Probably, knowing them. I don't think I hit anything vital. I mean, it was able to run off."

He wanted to strangle the clamoring thoughts in his head almost as much as he wanted to strangle himself for having them. His mind kept latching onto Deborah's words _—_ _didn't want to hurt me, scary look to it, skinny._ He couldn't let them go. Foggy finally finished the last stitch and tied off the ends, straightening up and rubbing his face harshly.

Jack turned halfway, probably to say thanks, but caught the look on Foggy's face and frowned. "Whoa, dude. Are you okay?"

"Huh? Yeah." No. "I'm just... tired." No, he wasn't. "I think I'm getting sick again." He really fucking wasn't. "Headache." You filthy fucking _liar._

"Oh. You gonna be all right? Sorry I had to pull you out of your room."

"It's okay. I wasn't... I wasn't doing anything." Not a thing, except obsessing over some dead feral from the Kitchen. Pathetic. "Not much in the way of extracurricular activities here," he said, trying to sound humorous. It fell flat on its face.

"Yeah, I know. It's fucking boring." Jack pulled his shirt back on and smiled gratefully as Deborah helped him back down to the floor. "You ever think of going on a run with us, Frank? We go down into the city sometimes." Scavenging, of course. "Or a hunt? Kill a couple of those fucking animals, might perk you up a little."

Foggy wanted to throw up. "No. No, I'm good."

"Probably for the best," Deborah said, giving Jack a pat on his shoulder but offering Foggy a weak grin. It still twitched with sadness, but it was an attempt, at least. She was a tough cookie. "We don't know what we'd do without you here. I'm sure you've saved all of us at least once."

"Twice," Foggy said, gathering all his tools back up again to sterilize them. "Trust me, I'm keeping count. I'm very good at it. You all owe me a hundred drinks."

They laughed at his joke.

He still wanted to throw up.

\---

Foggy woke up the next morning, hours before dawn, from a nightmare of teeth in his neck and the machine roaring in his head. He hunched over himself and caught his breath, struggling to suppress the sobs trying to come out of his stomach.

"I fucking hate you, Matt. So fucking much."

He staggered through his day half-awake and was glad for the buzzing emptiness that the exhaustion left inside his head.

\---

It was the same way the next morning. Instead of crying and cursing his dead best friend for a few hours, he rolled out of his cot, yanked his boots on, grabbed his rifle and his knife, and walked into the hall. Down the corridor, past Deborah's room, then Karen's, to the exit.

Foggy walked across the courtyard, opened the gate, and went into the woods.

\---

He didn't often go to the Park. It was more dangerous, now that fall was coming around. The smoky dampness of autumn making the ground softer and more difficult to navigate. Easier to slip and fall onto. There wasn't any other way around the fact that he was pretty clumsy. He always had been.

Besides, he was the medic. A precious commodity. They'd probably yell at him just for leaving the fucking courtyard. Nobody would stop him, of course, because deep down, nobody actually cared about _Foggy_.  They cared about _having a medic_.  Jack probably liked him, but Jack was the one who got himself fucked-up the most, so that was just a relationship born from proximity. Jack would get over it pretty fucking fast if Foggy ended up dead.

He blew out a chill-misted breath as he ducked beneath a tree branch. He didn't know what he'd find out here, but he knew he needed to find _something_ , he needed to find _closure_ , because hanging around thinking about Matt every fucking day was going to kill him. And Matt would be extremely disappointed in him if that happened.

He headed east, keeping his eyes to the ground for footprints. There were some, but they were scattered and dried and old. Some of them bare, some of them with shoes. He wondered how cold it got out here at night, if having bare feet would lead to frostbite.

This wasn't smart, he knew. It was dangerous, being alone in the Park where anything could grab him and tear his head off. Foggy couldn't really come up with any reason to turn back. Karen didn't give a fuck, too caught up on the ruination inside her skull. Deborah seemed to like him, but like Karen, she, too, had hurdles to jump emotionally and he wasn't terribly interested in a three-legged race.

Foggy climbed carefully over a fallen log. Yeah, he was good and lost now. It didn't matter. He sort of preferred it this way. There was a deep, quiet urge in him to just keep going, to walk away, down and out of the Park and through the boroughs and into the countryside and out of this goddamn flattened city.

Except the shelter had running water, and he _really fucking liked that bit_. He wasn't sure if anything could drag him away from that. Jesus, he hadn't even gotten a skin infection for months. And no stupid fucking nits.

Still, he was way too far from the shelter. Even if he turned back now, it would be late morning by the time he got back, and Karen would know he'd gone wandering out like a total idiot. If he got attacked, he'd be totally fucked.

So, of course, because life always hated Franklin Nelson, there was a sudden splitting roar behind him, and yep, he was totally fucked.

He jerked from the noise, whipping his head around to see what it was. All he caught a glimpse of was a hulking body charging through the trees, until it came closer, and he realized that it was the big fucker they were always complaining about. The one who'd killed _—_ at least _—_ five fucking people. Fantastic.

Foggy felt the panic leap up his throat, sluggishly. He wasn't as scared as he should have been. Less scattered, more focused. It had been a long time since he'd tangled up-close with a feral, and he knew that this was the last one he'd ever wanted to meet.

Well, almost. A close second.

He started backpedaling, as fast as he could, yanking the rifle from his shoulder. But he wasn't Matt, and couldn't sense the ground that lay behind him, and his ankle tripped up on a half-bare tree root. He fumbled the rifle; it dropped barrel-first into the mud.

_Fuck_. Foggy growled to himself as his ass squelched into the slushy earth and scrabbled back immediately, yanking the knife from its sheath behind him. The rifle was worthless now, but if this fucking feral was going to tear him apart, he was certainly going to take a few pieces of it with him. He got to his feet, gripping the blade carefully, like he remembered, like he'd been taught.

The feral, the big fucking bastard, Mr. Killed-Five-But-Probably-More-Than-Five-People-Already _—_ Jesus, he might have actually been part gorilla _—_ charged out from behind the crooked terrace of burnt trees, the roar booming from its lungs sounding like a grenade. Foggy really wished he had a grenade right now.

He set his feet, trying not to breathe too hard and set himself into panic as he anticipated where the big fuck would hit him. If it got close, Foggy could duck, stab upward, and maybe take off fast enough to not get crushed by the feral's weight.

Fuck _,_  he could swear he heard and felt the _ground_ rumble under his feet as the thing closed the last bit of distance. Foggy clenched his jaw, tightened his grip, waited for his chance to strike.

Something fast, _really fucking fast_ , brownish-blue, came sprinting out from the crushed tree trunks to his right, and he barely had the capacity to recognize it as _human-ish_ before it cut the bigass feral off mid-charge, giving it a whip-fast and heavy swing to the trachea before scrabbling for its face with a snarl, digging fingers in below a jaw and into an ear to slam its skull heavily to the ground.

No, God, Jesus fucking Christ, _no._

It was _Matt_ , of course it was _Matt_ , three motherfucking months out since Foggy had last seen him, all sinew and sharp movements and _noise_ , striking like a fucking viper, as light on his feet as a feather in a windstorm.

The big fucker got back up, its attention diverted, and Matt danced around it, untouchable. If there ever was an alpha, he would be the one, taunting the creature of muscle and bone back toward the treeline _—_ pulling its focus away from Foggy. He moved supernaturally, ducking blows before they could hit him, slipping away from those grasping, meaty hands like they were nothing. Foggy would have thought it a hallucination if he didn't know better, if he hadn't been on the receiving end of that focused rage all that time ago.

Matt coaxed it back into the trees, hopping around, landing on all fours, backpedaling up burnt tree trunks like he was water flowing through obstacles in a river, not at all slowed by any physical thing trying to trip him up. Of course, the big stupid feral took the bait, and tried to get after him, but Matt was too fucking fast. _Nothing_ could catch him.

Foggy's attacker was roaring, furious at its inability to catch its target. It knocked down a tree trunk, then another, trying to take Matt's height advantage away. And Matt just kept moving back, slipping in and out of shadows, hopping up into the trees and along branches, eventually perching, crouched, on a power pole. A dead one, because they were all dead.

The way Matt stayed there, not moving, on the very top of the pole, head tilted sharply, _waiting_ , told Foggy what he intended to do. Because Foggy _knew_ this animal, this man, and knew how his brain worked in a fight even if the rest of his brain wasn't there for anything else.

The big fuck walked right into it, swinging its arms with a roar, of course catching itself up in the power lines laying all over. They snapped as they moved through the air, little explosions of sound, tangling the feral up, and all it took was a few moments of stillness from it for Matt to snap off a spiraled insulator from the power pole. He flipped it over in his hand, pointed end down, and leapt, silent, a liquid shadow, striking out with a terrifyingly easy precision, driving it clean through the big bastard's skull.

Foggy could swear he heard the ground tremble again as it collapsed in a great heap, Matt landing neatly next to it, without a sound. Foggy stared, breathing hard, but he'd been watching too long, he had to move. Trying to keep calm, he backed up a few steps. He had to run. He _knew_ he had to run. But there was Matt, standing over his kill like the animal he was, and Foggy couldn't stop watching. He might never get the chance to see him again.

Then Matt's head tilted, sudden and sharp, and _fuck_. Foggy was _so_ fucking dead.

A scream tried to come out of Foggy's throat, a scream for help or mercy or _fucking anything_ , as Matt began to stalk toward him, all silence, all shadow. He moved with the grace of a predator, despite a stuttering limp in his left leg. His hair had grown _—_ almost shoulder-length, thanks Deborah _—_ but was still short on one side where Foggy had shaved it off all that time ago. It blew around in the wind, across his face, over his eyes, but of course he didn't care, because it wasn't going to be in his way.

There was no way Foggy could outrun him, so he tried to quell his pounding heart, and made a stand. He held the knife carefully. _Upward. Do it right this time. It's not Matt. It's not Matt. You need to finish it. It's not Matt. It's an animal. It's going to kill you if you don't kill it first._

God dammit. God _dammit_. Matt was like ten feet away. Foggy could see the muscles twitching under his skin, especially in his left side. He could see those hazy brown eyes behind the curtain of his filthy hair, dead, fixed. The scars on his arms, his legs, new ones, old ones. His clothing, stained, threadbare, shoes gone. A stranger. An _animal_. The animal that had nearly killed him in their apartment three months ago.

"Fuck. _Shit_."

And because he was really terrible at this, and his life hated him, the knife dropped from his quaking, treasonous hand. He roared in his head at his own stupidity, but his throat only made a soft squeaking noise. _You are the biggest idiot on the fucking planet, Nelson_.  He lurched forward, instinct, to grab it from the ground, and froze up. Matt was only a few feet away, and he was going to kill him this time. Matt was _definitely going to kill him this time_.

Matt didn't kill him.

Instead, he slowed his pace as Foggy bent for the weapon, then stopped completely when Foggy backpedaled in jittery fear. His dead expression, with fresh blood and old blood and mud and sludge from the river splashed up the side of his face, twitched marginally. He didn't move closer. He stood where he was, head tilted, like he was waiting for something.

Foggy found all the words in his body stolen away by the sight. For a short, burning moment, he believed that this could be _his_ Matt, his _Matty_ , coming back to himself, coming back to _Foggy,_ he'd just had a plateau, he was going to be okay _—_

Matt made a noise. "Hn." Not a word. But it wasn't a grunt or growl either.

He could still hear the rumble from the apartment, the roar of the sickness' engine. It was burned into his brain like a farmer's brand, white-hot, permanent. This did not sound like the roar from the apartment.

Foggy blurted into strained, rushed speech. "Yeah, hey, okay, shh, I'm not gonna attack you," he spoke as gently as he could, lifting his hands to show _—_ goddamnit, Nelson _—_ that he was unarmed. _He's still fucking blind, you monumental idiot_. "I'm just gonna go. Please don't attack me, pl _—_ oh, _Christ_."

Matt closed the space between them until he was only a few inches away. Foggy stopped, paralyzed. He could smell the stretched-rubber-band tang on him. The musky stench of the river. Blood, and blood, and _blood_. Foggy could see the burn on his face from the flare gun, or at least the scar left behind from it, shooting up under his right eye, cutting a pale furrow through the hair on his temple. His left hand twitched. He slowly raised his right, and Foggy knew that this was it, he was going to get strangled. He just wished he could _move_ like he wanted to, but every inch of him only wanted to _stay_.

Instead of grabbing him and attempting to suffocate him to death like in the apartment, Matt reached up, clumsy and stiff, and brushed a palm over Foggy's shoulder. Down his arm. Back up his chest. Searching, studying. Head tilted down and to the side, listening. Fantastic, he was getting a feel copped by his ex-friend and the most _dangerous feral he would ever meet_. "Hey..."

"Hn," came the reply. Still not a word. Still not a growl. A twitch stuttered across Matt's face, all inconsistent movement in muscles that had probably atrophied. His eyebrows tightened, momentarily chasing away that dead look.

What was this? _What the fuck was this?_

Matt's lips twitched; his eyebrows creased again. He tried to say something but the word came out in a dry grunt. Another ripple of movement across his face, and Foggy could have sworn on God and Jesus and all those stupid Thor motherfuckers that it was _frustration_. He was seeing _frustration_ on this too-familiar animal's expression.

"...Matt?"

That got his attention immediately. Full-body, turned completely in Foggy's direction, one hand on his chest. Total focus. His eyes twitched around. One of them was bloodshot, like he'd recently taken a blow to his head. The frustration slipped back onto his face and was gone just as quickly. It looked familiar; it looked like all those times Foggy had been there while he fought back to himself, when he'd crawl out of that blood-scented pit of the sickness to sit shivering on the edge, waiting for the day he'd slip and fall back in again.

"...Matt... do you _remember?"_

The man shuddered, hard and sudden, like an electric shock had hit him, and he leaned in close, so fucking close, Foggy could count his eyelashes, _holy hell_ he was chest-to-chest with a feral and not fucking dead, chest-to-chest with Matt and not sobbing openly.

Gently, and carefully, _so fucking carefully_ , Matt tilted his head down, and pressed his forehead to Foggy's, eyes darting everywhere.  His right hand moved from Foggy's chest to his neck, wiry fingers tapping aimlessly against his skin like he was knocking on a door with the intention to not disturb. What was he _doing?_ He could have easily broken Foggy's neck eighteen times by now. He could have flipped him to the ground and choked the life out of him. He didn't.

"Matt... _Jesus_.  _Matty_. You know who I am, don't you?"

Matt pushed harder, all filth and sweat against Foggy's skin, and his hand rubbed marginally against his collarbone, barely a touch at all, and he chuffed _—_ _frustration! He can't say anything, he's feral, he can't talk! Bridge the gap!—_ before finding Foggy's shirt and gathering up a handful, pulling himself closer, as close as he could get. An old habit. A reflex. A reflex that he _still fucking had._

Foggy's stomach flipped over, then flipped again, then took a dive and ended up somewhere under his feet. " _Matt_ ," he repeated.

"Nngh," Matt said, twisting the shirt, shifting downward with his forehead travelling roughly over Foggy's cheek, smearing mud everywhere, before pushing his face into Foggy's shoulder. He breathed deeply, sniffing, listening, _feeling_. His head turned and he pressed his nose against Foggy's jugular vein, skin freezing cold. "Ffff," he tried, enunciating the noise slowly and carefully.

Matt should have bitten him by now. His teeth were centimeters from his neck, but he didn't bite. He didn't do anything but try to talk, and fail.

"It's Foggy. Matt, I'm Foggy."

"... _F'g_ ," he blurted, barely a word, barely anything at all, and whined into Foggy's throat _—_ such a mournful sound _—_ pressing harder, and Jesus, if he tried to get any closer he'd be in Foggy's chest. "F'g."

"Yeah, man, that's right. Foggy. Do you... remember me, buddy?"

"F'g." It was, apparently, the only word Matt would to try to enunciate. His fingers finally relaxed on Foggy's shirt, but didn't let go. A sigh spilled from his mouth. He clenched and unclenched his jaw; his eyes rolled around slowly. "H'me," he breathed, warm against Foggy's skin, then repeated it. "H'me."

"You want to go home?"

A keening whine came from Matt's throat. Foggy didn't know if it was a _yes_ or a _no_ or a _man you smell tasty why am I wasting my time with this bullshit_.  He assumed the first one. Matt wiggled closer and pressed his face into Foggy's neck, like all those months ago, all those empty nights with those heavy sobs dampening his skin.

It felt like a missing limb had been replaced. Foggy didn't know what to do. Everything just _hurt._

"I'm sorry, Matty... the apartment burned down."

"Mn?" The inflection was weak but it was there. Animals didn't talk with inflection.

"The apartment burned down," he repeated, gently.

Matt's head tilted _—_ no, he was shaking it, just marginally, like doing so was a distant memory and he was hazy on how to do it correctly. "F'g h'me," he said, burrowing his nose under Foggy's ear, shutting his eyes. "F'g h'me."

Foggy felt ill. "Matt. I can't take you with me. You know that."

A loud huff against his earlobe. It tickled, but he didn't so much as twitch, afraid of startling his friend and watching him dart off into the darkness. Another whimper. _Jesus_. Foggy lifted a hand, very slowly, very carefully, and settled it on the base of Matt's neck.

Matt straight-up fucking _melted_ into him, like he'd been sedated, the grip on Foggy's shirt loosening. There was a high, fractured noise, not a whine, and not a grunt, coming up painful out of Matt's throat _—_ a _sob_.  It sounded like breaking glass. "F'g," he breathed, then swallowed, and the glass broke again, and then with great difficulty, one halting syllable at a time, "miss'd'y."

_Fog, missed you._

He wanted to throw up.

_Fog, missed you._

"Fucking hell, Matt," he whispered, not moving his hand from the man's neck. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know what he could possibly do to make this okay for anyone. There weren't a lot of choices on the table.

Option A: take Matt out of the Park and back to the shelter. Unfortunately, Karen _—_ sorry, ma'am, _Paige_ , what a lazy pseudonym _—_ would definitely kill him the moment she saw him.

Option B: take Matt and go back to the Kitchen. They could find another place, another apartment to live in, maybe, and stay there, quietly.

Option C: leave Matt. He could very clearly survive out here. Maybe Foggy could visit every once in a while. Like a zoo for your feral ex-best friend. No entry fees.

Option D: not even really an option, fuck you, _I'm not doing that._

_Fog, missed you._

Matt kept pushing his face against his neck, shivering, clutching. His skin felt so cold, but it felt _whole_ and _right_ and Foggy was pretty sure his heart was somewhere around his ankles in a thousand pieces. Maybe on top of his stomach. They were all freezing and painful.

"He'p," Matt pleaded, his voice fracturing the word, low and shivering and barely audible. Broken like the rest of him. " _He'p_."

Help.

_Help._

Jesus. Foggy didn't even know how to help himself at the moment. There wasn't much he could do with the ice in his body and the rapid heavy thrum of his heart in his ears. "Matt, I'm sorry, I..."

Warmth on his neck. Not blood.

"Okay... buddy... I gotta..." he swallowed and gently pushed Matt off of him, but Matt certainly wasn't having any of that, because he whined and immediately forced his way back, pushing his face into that well-worn spot against Foggy's neck. Jesus Christ, he was _strong_. He'd forgotten _how_ strong. "No, no, Matty. You gotta get off me."

Another sob, harsh, in his ear. Matt clutched tighter. "He'p."

"I _can't_."

The sob twisted into another high whine. Desperate, like the last noises of a dying animal. It felt like freezing fire when it entered his head.

"I know, Matt, I know." He didn't know. He really fucking didn't. Foggy gently untangled the hand from his shirt, removing Matt from his neck again. The space left behind felt colder than the internal organs he'd dropped carelessly on the ground. He pushed Matt back to arm's length, even though he would rather saw off his own limbs than do it at all. "Buddy, I gotta go. They're gonna be looking for me. They'll kill you if they find you."

This time, Matt listened. He retreated back a few feet as his shoulders fell and his eyes searched the emptiness they only ever saw beneath them. A long rattling sigh came from his chest. The machine, idling. He shifted on his feet, lingering, as if he wanted to say something and was working up the courage _—_ and yet... _and yet_. It looked like this was something Matt expected, a vague sort of acceptance on that empty, filthy face of his. Like he knew this would be the outcome. Unwelcome, unwanted. Damned to a half-life of mud and ash. Because he had made the mistake of protecting his best friend.

Foggy wondered what was going through his head, if anything at all. "Matty, I gotta go back where I came from, okay?" His thoughts rolled madly in his head like boiling water. Pick an option, pick an option, pick an option, pick before he runs off, pick before you never see him again. He worried at his lower lip, then took a breath, and made his choice.

"Come with me."

The sight of Matt perking up at those words made Foggy's eyes prickle with pain, white-hot and damning. A shaking grin flashed across Matt's face, uneven. Pure unfiltered _joy_. Foggy wasn't sure he'd ever seen a look on Matt's face that was as raw and genuine as that one. It startled him so badly that he forgot to talk, which made the grin fade away. Watching it slowly drop down into the vague emptiness that the sickness had permanently placed there hurt far more than watching it come to life.

Foggy's voice cracked as he spoke. "Stay with me, okay?"

He rubbed his face and started walking, turning away from Matt slowly despite the scream in the back of his head warning him against it. As soon as he took a step, Matt made a noise and bent to the ground for something.

"F'g, F'g," he said. It sounded like _fig_. Like he hadn't spoken in years.

Foggy turned back and Matt was holding out his knife, handle first, eyes tilted to the ground. He remembered a dusty apartment and an _I got you something_ and a _stab upward_ and a machine-roar of fury and his eyes filled right back up with a pain that he would never be able to wipe away.

He reached out and took the knife. "Thanks."

Matt grinned again. Uneven, unpracticed, but still pure sunlight.

Foggy mirrored it.

"Come on, buddy. Let's go."

He had no idea what the fuck he was doing.


	7. ...that somebody loved me

Foggy picked his way carefully through the ash and charcoal that was left of the trees, and Matt was one step behind him at all times. He knew this was a bad idea. He knew that he was going to get someone hurt. But he also knew that it felt like his whole world had been pushed back together again, that the ground had been replaced under his feet after a lifetime of free-fall. He was not going to lose that feeling for anything.

"F'g," Matt mumbled, over and over, clearly his favorite of the few words he had figured out how to say. "F'g, F'g, F'g." _Fig, fig, fig._

"Fog- _gy_. It's Fog-gy, two syllables. Try to say it."

Matt tried to frown, but couldn't work the motion out, and instead ended up tilting his head in a sharp angle. Sharper than he used to. He licked his lips and clenched his jaw, trying to work out how speech was supposed to go out of his mouth.

The sickness had fucked him, bad. It had torn his brain to shreds, just like Foggy knew it would, but somehow, even _alone_ , Matt had put the shreds clumsily back together and sought _him_ out. And here he was, crawling back from a place Foggy thought even Matt couldn't get out of: complete metastasis. Total system takeover. Blue screen of death.

How far could he get, Foggy wondered. How much more of Matt could be reclaimed?

"Ff," Matt was trying. He was trying so hard. "Fo-Fog." Shit, an entire whole word. It was like hearing your baby's first word. Except his baby was only a few inches shy of six feet tall and made of ash and mud and scarring and neurological damage. "Fog, Fog, Fog," Matt repeated, getting used to it, practicing in a methodical way that was so fucking like _himself_ that it burned in Foggy's eyes.

"Fog- _gy_ ," he eventually managed, and a grin split those pale, still features of his in half at the achievement-- fuck, who needed a flashlight with that shit blaring in their face? "Foggy." He almost sounded like Matt when he said it.

"Good! That's great, Matt."

Matt kept grinning, and balanced carefully up a half-fallen tree trunk as Foggy walked past it. "Foggy," he repeated, triumphantly. "Foggy, Foggy, Foggy." It sounded like his old cell phone, from a billion years ago.

"Yep, that's my name." Foggy thought a second. "Remember yours?"

That stopped Matt in his tracks, which could have been dangerous because he was still up on the trunk, but he recovered with that liquid reflex he had and hopped lightly down to the ground. He hurried over, stumbling once on his trembling leg, to Foggy's side, keeping in step with him, and whined. Brushed at his elbow with the back of a hand, all jerky, hesitant familiarity.

"You don't remember, huh?"

A twitch of the head, probably meant to be a shake.

He answered to Matt, but didn't even realize it was his own name. Fuck. How much of his brain was gone, chewed apart by the virus? He didn't remember _words_. He didn't remember _anything_. All those years of college down the drain.

Before that, though? Did he remember his father? Did he remember the gunshot? The orphanage? The jackass that trained him but left partway through like a dickhead, taking most of Matt's inheritance with him? It could definitely be a positive side to this entire beyond-fucked situation. Was it all permanent, or temporary, like the plateau? Could he backslide again and go right back to trying to rip Foggy's throat out?

Too many goddamn questions. He could work out the logistics later.

He was being stupid. He was being so fucking stupid. But he couldn't _stop_. He would rather fucking _die_. The conviction in that thought frightened him.

"It's okay, I remember. I've been calling you it... you're Matty-- uh, Matt. It's Matt, okay? Don't put a 'y' on the end--"

"Matty," he was already repeating, handling both syllables with a clumsy harshness. Goddamnit. Then, clear as anything, out of nowhere: "I remember."

Foggy stopped so short at the words that he nearly faceplanted into the mud. Matt grabbed him to prevent it without even turning his head.

"What?" Foggy sputtered, whipping his head around. "You remember?"

Matt was staring-- not-staring-- at the ground. He licked his lips and spoke cautiously. "You-- you remember?"

"Remember _what?"_

"Remember what?"

 _What?!_   Oh, fuck. "...Are you repeating me?"

"...Re-repeating me?"

Well, that made sense. Matt looked incredibly proud of himself, anyway. Was that a good sign? It hadn't happened before. Not even any of the times he'd had a plateau, when they were still living in the apartment together. He didn't know what to think of that.

Foggy hummed, a thought stirring in his head. How much did he understand? "Hey, Matt, can you climb up that tree for me?" He pointed out at one that was still partially standing. _Blind_ , he reminded himself, an old reflex that was somehow still sticking around, and then, _super awesome senses, don't worry 'bout it._

Matt tilted his head at him.

"That tree. Can you climb it?"

He tilted his head the other way.

"All right, I guess not." It was worth a try. Foggy had to find some way to see if Matt understood. He wasn't sure what to do if shit went down and he had to direct Matt somewhere else for his own safety. The people at the shelter weren't going to be happy.

Matt looked a little pained, and his eyes started flicking around, and Foggy could _hear_ the machine in his head coughing, sputtering, groaning into life. "The..." he scratched his ear. Blinked hard. Something connected in his brain, Foggy could see it in his expression, the slight relaxation of his facial muscles. "Tree. Whi-which? Tree?"

Foggy stared.

"...Which tree?"

Foggy blinked, twice. _Matt was asking him which one!_   That meant Matt had pulled the words out of his own head. _That_ meant his head wasn't fucking empty.

"That one right over there." Foggy pointed to one, isolated in the middle of the mud, ignoring the way his voice cracked.

Matt half-turned toward it, making a low noise. Then he took off, and _good fucking Christ on a crutch_ he was fast; it didn't even look like his feet touched the ground, even with the fucked-up leg. He reached the tree in about negative eight seconds and climbed to the top in half that time. Matt crouched on the highest branch, looking expectantly down at Foggy-- well, head tilted expectantly down in his direction in a way only Matt could accomplish-- with a proud and eager grin on his face.

He didn't need to hear words to know what his friend was saying.

_Look! I did it, I understood you, look!_

Something hardened to a sharp point in Foggy's chest at the sight. "Jesus, buddy," he breathed, wiping his face, pushing away the hot tears on his cheeks. "Jesus Christ."

Matt climbed down with a few light jumps from branch to branch. Confusion played across his face as he approached Foggy again-- yes, that was _definitely_ confusion, and worry, and Foggy recognized it-- and that fact made him suck in a painful breath and let it out as a heavy sob. This was Matt. This was his Matty.

"Foggy," Matt said, inching closer. The confusion went out on a tide and concern replaced it. He knew Foggy was crying, but he didn't seem to know what to do about it. He whined a few times, short and low in the back of his throat. "Foggy. Foggy."

"It's okay, man, it's okay," Foggy replied, and the words opened the floodgate, and then he was rambling with his cracked voice and the high whine of tears that sounded more than a little bit like his friend. "Jesus fucking Christ, man, look at you, holy _shit_ , I can't believe I found you, you're such an idiot, why didn't you come back, what the _hell_ are you even doing out here, mother of fuck, I thought you were _dead_ , I wa--"

He was cut off by Matt pressing himself close again, eyelash-counting close, anxiety tightening his face and confusion twisting it downward. He knew Foggy was upset, but he didn't know how to fix it, and the tortured expression he held ripped Foggy's own in half. Matt leaned in and pushed his forehead against Foggy's again, paradoxically both gentle and overpowering. Trying to comfort him in the only way he could figure out how.

"I'm okay. I'm okay." No, he wasn't, he really wasn't, and the sobs were rocketing up out of his gut already, leaving phosphor trails burning through his chest. A white-hot, painful, beautiful little fire. "I'm gonna hug you," he said-- reflex, warnings for a blind man, how could he still be doing that-- and then made good on it, crushing his friend in a hug. Matt bucked once, probably also a reflex, but an instant later he was doing the exact opposite, clinging to Foggy's shirt, grinning and grinning like it was the best thing that he'd ever experienced. He was so thin, all bone and hard edges beneath his clothing. "I missed you, man, I fucking missed you, you have no idea, you big stupid idiot, I'm not letting you out of my sight _ever again_."

Matt huffed unevenly against his neck. Laughter. In his own backwards way.

"Don't-- don't _breathe_ at me, you sack of shit, I'm _serious_."

Even backwards was a type of movement.

\---

They approached the shelter right as the sun was hitting its apex. Matt had stayed either right behind him or right next to him the entire walk, immensely satisfied to just be _near_ him. Foggy could scream. Matt was alive, with him, not trying to strangle him, and only about ninety-five percent fucked in the head. That unfucked five percent was a gift from fucking heaven. He was going to hold onto that five percent until either of them died. And maybe a little afterward. It was _his_ now.

But as they reached the end of the treeline, a few hundred meters before the battered old building and its fenceline came into view, Matt stopped in his tracks, grabbing Foggy's arm and pulling him back into the Park. "Foggy, Foggy. D--" he was hunting for a word in his fractured head, but didn't find it, "--n-not. Foggy."

Foggy looked at him. "What?"

Matt just shook his head in that half-aborted, jerky way he did and tried to lead him back where they came from.

"Hey, it's okay. This is just where I live now. It's okay. I'll keep you safe."

"Foggy," he urged, working his jaw, frustrated. The words he wanted just weren't there. Matt pulled him again, still far stronger than Foggy could have ever expected, dragging him along.

"Matt, Matty, hey, it's _fine_. Nothing's gonna hurt you." He dug in his heels. "Stop. Matt, stop!"

The order took hold immediately and Matt let him go, confused. It was hard for him to be anything but confused. "Foggy," he said, circling him, throat working on syllables but nothing recognizable coming out. The struggle taking place in his head played out on his face and it hurt to watch. "Foggy."

"I know, buddy, but it's okay. You'll be fine."

Matt huffed, like an impatient dog, circling around to Foggy's right and grabbing his hand with calloused, but gentle-- God, always gentle, even now, the apartment incident notwithstanding-- fingers, placing Foggy's palm on his shoulder. Through a rip in the decaying fabric of his shirt, he could see the still-pink scar from the arrow, that red-feathered arrow all the way back from the Jurassic era.

"I know they shot you. I'm the one who fixed you."

Matt jerked his head in a shake, guiding Foggy's touch down, along his other arm, where there was a fresh scab, ripped just above the side of his elbow. It couldn't have happened more than a week ago. The way it punched through the skin and out the other side made him think it was from a bullet. Karen taking potshots.

Foggy carefully pushed his anger aside, and grabbed Matt's arm to study the wound. The edge of the scab was uneven and jagged, but it was healing. It'd leave an ugly scar, but what was Matt, besides a collection of really ugly scars?

A man who'd survived a virus that had killed everyone else it touched, for one.

"Is that where they shot you?" he asked, watching Matt's face relax in relief in the fact that he'd gotten the information across. "How many times, Matty?"

"Mmn," he grunted, then guided Foggy's hand around himself casually. There was another one on his hip, mostly healed, one right along the inside of his thigh, still healing, and one more above his left knee, and it looked the worst. It was recent, inflamed, with yellow pus visible along the edges. Not a bullet wound, though-- it didn't go all the way through and hadn't popped his kneecap open like a fucking orange.

No, if Foggy had to guess, and he did, and he was correct: Jack's arrow, from just the other day. Matt really had been the one that saved them. A confusing surge of both pride and worry washed through him. Matt had probably ripped the arrow out himself because he didn't have anyone to cut and remove it. Jesus.

"Ouch, buddy. You need to let me see that."

Matt immediately flopped down on the ground-- and mud-- and let him.

 _I trust you_ , the movement said. _Help me. I trust you._

"God. Okay... you didn't have to do that. But okay." Foggy came closer, shoving the ripped material of the jeans out of his way while pushing the circling thoughts from his head. Jesus, it looked like it _hurt_. Matt had always had a lunatic pain tolerance, but he wasn't sure how it had been affected by the sickness. "Fuck, Matt. You need antibiotics." Thank fuck he'd run into him _now_. If this shit went untreated, it would probably kill him. Painfully. And, well, now that Foggy had him, he'd die before he let that happen. "Can you go inside that place with me? That's where all my stuff is. I can't do it out here."

"Foggy," Matt whined.

"I know. You don't want to go in there. I know you don't. But you gotta, okay? You gotta come with me. I need to clean your leg out and..." and _what?_ Somehow convince all those people inside that Matt wasn't dangerous, when he was probably the most dangerous thing in a fifty-mile radius? And Karen, _God_ , Karen. She was going to go apeshit. Foggy couldn't tell her. She'd kill Matt on the spot. She wouldn't have a reason _not_ to.

Foggy rubbed his face. "Let's just get you there. We can worry about the rest later. Come on."

Matt hopped back to his feet, left leg shivering as it tried to go out from under him. He frowned down at it, as if it were an ornery animal he could intimidate into action and not part of his own body.

"Come on," Foggy repeated, waving him over. "It'll be okay."

"Okay," Matt repeated. He hovered close-- he didn't seem to understand personal space, not that Foggy gave half a shit-- and stood there, waiting patiently. His head twitched, constantly, as he listened to everything around him. If Foggy didn't know about his sense of hearing, he'd assume it was a neurological symptom. Which wasn't going to be easy to explain, if he was able to get Matt inside without someone finding out.

Fuck, what was he _doing_. He was going to get Matt killed. No, his mind reminded him, he would have likely died anyway from that arrow wound. Or starvation. Or Karen, firing out at the ferals all the goddamn time because she found it _fun_. Or another feral. Or _anything_.

Screw it. Foggy was going to fucking do this shit and he'd deal with the consequences later. He wasn't spending another goddamn minute without his friend at his side, feral or not.

Matt continued to wait, silent, idly bringing a hand up to his mouth to chew on his fingernails. _He still chewed on his goddamn fingernails._ Ferals didn't do that.

Still. Fucking gross. "Hey, don't chew on those. You're covered in shit. It's disgusting."

"Disgus--?" Matt made a face, unable to complete the word, unable to understand. He defaulted to the only word he could say with any degree of accuracy. "Foggy?"

"Disgusting. Do you know what this is?"

"What this is?"

"No, your--" he sighed, then reached out, brushing a careful finger on the back of Matt's hand-- habit-- to let him know he was there, then took his hand and pushed the pad of his thumb on his nails. What was left of them. Matt had obviously done this a lot. "Don't chew on these."

"Hngh." Matt tried to frown. It went halfway and stopped. He grabbed Foggy's hand and started touching it all over, feeling out the shape of it. His fingers landed on his watch and he made a humming sound. "Foggy, what?"

"What?"

"Foggy, what... what is?"

"Huh?" He blinked hard, trying to figure out what the fuck Matt was trying to say.

"Foggy, what is this?" Matt tapped the wrist strap of the watch with his fingers.

"Oh, my watch?"

"Watch, what is this?"

"I tell time with it. It's..." Foggy wasn't sure how many words he was saying that Matt just didn't comprehend. But he had to start somewhere, right? "It's kind of pointless right now, 'cause I never know if it's on the right time. But I use it mostly to count a pulse."

"Pulse, what is this?"

"It's... it's where you can feel someone's heart. Here." Foggy grabbed Matt's hand, gently placing two fingers over the pulse point on his wrist. His heartbeat was hammering; it had been since he'd stepped out here. "You feel it?"

A tiny smile played at Matt's lips. Yeah, he could feel it.  He could definitely hear Foggy's heartbeat, and now he had a physical sensation to go along with it. "Mm," he said.

"That's a 'yes', Matty."

"Yes."

"Look at you, talking like a fucking pro already." He wasn't. Foggy didn't care. If he had the time and safety to sit right there and teach Matt the entire fucking dictionary again, he would have. "If you don't understand something, ask me, okay?"

"Okay."

"Was that a repeat or are you actually saying 'okay'?"

Matt chewed on his tongue. "Yes." His eyes flicked around rapidly. "Yes. Okay."

Foggy understood. He fought back a straight-up yelp of joy. _He understood what the fuck Matt was trying to talk about._ They'd bridged the gap, together. He might cry later if he had the time. Right now, though, Matt needed to get inside and Foggy needed to stop his knee from going septic.

"All right, buddy, we need to keep going. Before someone sees us out here."

"...Okay."

He started walking, and Matt followed him, tripping once on his injured leg with a soft grunt. It was probably fucking agony at this point, especially being so close to the joint, which made the wound shift and stretch every time he moved. Hence the infection. How was he still jumping around like a maniac and stabbing people in the skull with that shit?

"Just a little longer, bud. Stay close. I don't want them to see you."

Foggy looked over his shoulder at Matt, studying him. Jesus, if anyone caught sight of him now, they'd _both_ get shot. Matt was a total wreck, covered in mud and ash, hair all over the fucking place. He tried to start chewing on his fingers again, but then a thought rolled slowly across his face, and he stopped himself.

"Matt, come here."

He bounced over, obedient, expectant. _Happy._

"Here," Foggy said, leaning closer, "let's just..."

He reached up and started shaking the clumps of dirt out of Matt's hair, scraping it gently off of his face with his fingernails, brushing the removed bits off of his shirt. Matt let him do it, screwing his eyes shut, like it was uncomfortable, but then Foggy leaned in closer to get at his facial hair and he saw the tiny, hesitant smile on his friend's face.

"Feels good getting that stuff off, huh?"

"Good," Matt repeated. His cautious smile grew a little. "Yes."

He liked it. Nevermind that he was letting Foggy touch him-- a _feral_ was letting Foggy _touch him_ \-- he was _enjoying_ being taken care of, being interacted with, being _touched, getting attention_. Matt was leaning into it, comforted, almost desperate-- starving for human contact. Jesus.

"There. That's about as good as you'll get, I think. You don't look so scary anymore." No, he still looked pretty terrifying. Definitely a _shoot-on-sight_ sort of image. Whatever. He tried.

Matt chewed at his lip for a very long time, so long Foggy thought he'd checked out again. Foggy shook his shoulder, alarmed, but Matt huffed and said, very slowly, like he was afraid he'd picked the incorrect word, "Lie."

 _What?!_ "Seriously? I thought I'd gotten out of that."

"That?"

"Your lie detector."

"Detect--?"

"You know, when you... ah, fuck it." Explaining it was impossible. He just _knew things_ , isn't that what he'd said, all those years ago on that couch?  "I know my heart's beating faster, but I'm just happy to see you."

"See you?"

"Yeah. I'm..." oh good, now he was confused because Matt was confused and neither of them knew what either was talking about. Ugh. "It's good, Matt, it's very good."

Matt grinned. Foggy might have gone temporarily blind from looking at it. Luckily, he had something more important to think about, and turned back toward the building before any retinal damage could occur.

"Okay. Moment of truth. Be quiet. I have to sneak you in."

Foggy tapped the back of Matt's hand and he turned his palm upward so Foggy could grab it. Another reflex he still had. So many tiny degrees of him were still present, after the virus had burned almost everything else away. Would anyone else have even looked for them?

"Shh. Come on."

He led him carefully to the fenceline, feeling Matt's grip tighten in fear when he opened the gate. Foggy gritted his teeth, glancing around wildly, looking for a sign that anyone had seen them. It was quiet, besides the distant buzz of the electricity in the upper parts of the fence.

Letting out a breath, he started across the courtyard to the back door of the shelter.  
It was unlocked, thank fuck. Foggy turned the doorknob and pushed the door open slightly, peering inside. Empty. He couldn't believe their luck.

"Okay. Shh. Quiet, buddy."

Matt was dead fucking silent, shadowing him closely, head twitching. The fear was apparent on his face. He knew, just as Foggy did, how dangerous it was for him to be here. He still came, though, he still followed. And just as Foggy did, he'd decided the reward was far greater than the risk.

Any risk was worth this reward.

They slipped down the hall. Past Karen's door-- quiet inside. Past Deborah's door-- someone was shuffling around, and Matt tilted his head to listen, but Foggy pulled him closer, biting down on his lip as he powered through the last few meters to his door. He shoved it open and all but tossed Matt inside, slamming the door shut behind him and locking it. Foggy let out a shivering breath and leaned against it, rubbing his face with both hands.

Matt looked totally fucking lost, shuffling his feet, picking idly at one of the ten thousand loose threads hanging off of his shirt. He still fucking _fidgeted_. "Foggy," he said, because he didn't know what else to say.

"I know. I know, buddy." Foggy crossed the short space and put his things down on the desk. He grabbed his bag-- the knapsack Matt had collected, back when his brain was mostly in one piece-- and dug through it. The first aid kit was still there, something he'd squirreled away, but it was pretty limited. "Here, Matty. Sit down," he said, grabbing his shitty computer chair and pulling it over.

"Yes." Matt found it with the back of his hand and let his fingers dance gently over the backrest before plopping down in it. When it spun slightly because of his weight, he grunted in confusion. "Foggy."

"Yeah, it's... it's a piece of shit. Just hold still. I'm gonna clean your leg, buddy."

The jeans were a lost cause, so he just cut them away. All of Matt's clothes were a lost cause at this point. Jesus, he was still wearing the shirt he'd had to use because the last one had gotten covered in brains. It felt like a year ago. The horse looked like shit. It probably _was_ shit.

"Shh, shh, I know," Foggy breathed as Matt hissed and stiffened underneath him. "God. How are you even walking on this?" Forget that he was _walking_ on it, he'd also been _jumping around in the trees and onto power poles_ like the ninja he was with the same injury. Foggy knew the answer, of course. Stubborn bastard. So stubborn he refused to die of a _one-hundred-percent fatal_ virus.

Ninety-nine-point-nine percent, then. Fuck the bell curve.

Matt took a long while to find the word in his head and pin it down, gritting his teeth around it. "Hurts."

"Yeah, no fucking shit. You're probably getting tendinitis." Foggy started working on cleaning it, bracing one hand under Matt's knee to steady himself. "Dude, don't kick me in the face, okay?"

"...Okay."

He cleared the dried mud and ash and blood away, then started on the wound itself, dabbing as gently as he possibly could. Matt didn't strike out, or start growling, or fight back at _all_. He whined, sharp and high-pitched, in the back of his throat, and kept himself still as asked.

"I gotta disinfect it, Matty. It's not gonna... feel awesome."

Matt's eyes rolled around. "Awesome, what is this?" he asked, his voice mostly air, swallowing back that high whine.

Foggy felt himself grin despite the situation. "It means good. So, it's not gonna feel good. Hold still." He uncapped the alcohol-- Matt made a face at the scent of it-- and grabbed his knee tightly to stop him from bucking too hard before just going for it. "I know, I know."

" _Foggy_ ," he managed, then just spat out a messy pile of syllables and whines and half-words that didn't even sound English, curling around himself, huffing for breath, each outward push of air a whine, each inward pull an even higher one. "Hurts."

"Yeah, I know, I'm almost done." He hadn't lied. Foggy set the alcohol aside, feeling Matt shuddering underneath his hands-- yeah, this felt familiar-- listening to that high animal noise of pain.

Matt didn't attack him, though. He didn't even try.

"That looks a lot better," Foggy breathed, half to himself. He considered sutures, but knew because of the location, they'd be ripped out in half a day. Gauze and careful wrapping it'd have to be, then. He peered close at the wound to make sure he got all the mud out. It was deep. "You think there's anything inside there, buddy?"

"In-inside there?"

"Yeah. Something that... something that doesn't belong there. Something not part of you?" Foggy asked, trying to make it as simple as possible.

"Hhgh." Matt leaned down, huffing through his nose. "Yes."

"What, really? What is it?"

A huffing, frustrated grunt. Matt didn't know the word. He reached down instead, fingers shivering over the wound.

"Whoa, whoa, don't stick your fucking fingers in there, dude. Jesus. I have tweezers." Foggy leaned over to yank them from the first-aid kit, locating his penlight near the bottom and clicking it on. He stuffed it in his mouth and leaned in close. Oh, duh. "Hold still, Matt. I gotta dig."

"Dig, what is th-- _hhgh, Fog_ \--" he only got out the beginning of his name. The rest was a soupy mixture of that horrible high whine and something incomprehensible.

"Yep. I know." He grabbed was he was aiming for, though-- a two-inch splinter, a fragment of the arrow that had gone into him. Left behind when Matt, presumably, yanked it out of himself. "That's why it hurt so fucking bad, Matty. You still had shit stuck in there. Gimme your hand."

Matt reached out-- his left hand, it still shivered harshly, worse than ever-- and Foggy dropped the fragment of wood in it, watching him hold it gingerly, rolling it in his palm, touching it gently with a finger. He took a few breaths before talking. "Inside?"

"Not anymore. That little splinter would have killed you, bud." His voice trembled. If he hadn't gone out, if he hadn't stormed into the woods like an idiot, someone would have found him dead in the woods from sepsis, and he would have just been tossed in the burn pile with all the others. Unimportant. Another forgotten fucking corpse. "One more pass with the alcohol, and I'll wrap it up, okay?"

"Okay." Matt was still messing with the splinter with a strange fascination.

"Don't let that get inside you again, man," Foggy said, worrying that Matt would clench his fist and bury it in his hand. He poured the alcohol again, and the whining started back up, that sad and tortured little sound that stabbed right into his ears and hurt to listen to more than the alcohol probably hurt in Matt's fucking leg. "Okay, there. Done."

Foggy wrapped it up with the same gentleness he always had, feeling the muscles underneath the gauze slowly relax as the pain began to fade. "You think you can take some antibiotics?"

"Antibiotics, what is this?"

"Pills, Matty."

Matt blinked hard, chewing on his lip. He didn't understand.

A shot, then. Foggy could get one from the infirmary later. Matt would probably just eat the fucking pills and that wouldn't be pleasant, not with his sense of taste. Any sort of discomfort he could prevent from happening to his friend was going to be priority.

He taped down the gauze-- he hadn't used much, because it was going to be replaced in a minute-- and stood up, tossing the kit onto the table. "Okay, you're done with that."

Matt was up and moving before Foggy even finished talking, darting away from the chair and medical supplies like it was a perimeter of hurt that he could totally avoid if he got away quick enough. His limp was a lot less pronounced now, at least. It was still going to hurt like hell for a while.

Next order of business: make Matt look less goddamn terrifying. Foggy wondered if he should be worried about how eager he was to take Matt in and fix him up and put him back together again. To care for him. A feral. He knew Matt would do the exact same fucking thing for him if the situation was reversed.

Foggy sighed and went into the bathroom. "Over here, Matt."

It was such a tiny little room, but somehow they both got crowded inside. Was Matt claustrophobic? Didn't matter.

"Here we go. Shower time."

Foggy leaned in to turn on the spray. It ran cold, but a freezing shower was better than none at all, especially with how caked in mud Matt had become over the months. If he was going to attempt to sneak him into the fold, he at least had to look slightly presentable.

"Shower, what is this?"

"It's an amazing, magical experience that you might not get again, so take your clothes off, and get in."

Matt tilted his head, either confused or intrigued by the sound of the shower. He leaned forward, reaching out until the spray hit the back of his hand. He withdrew his arm with a sharp hiss, frowning.

"It's not poisoned. They've run it through a purifier. And I only get ten gallons a week, so you gotta move, okay?" Foggy rubbed his face. He really didn't want to wrestle the clothes off of his friend, but Matt was still hesitating, so that was exactly what he ended up doing. All of it was so worn it was practically disintegrating anyway-- the horse on the shirt wasn't even a horse anymore, just a weird grey blob. The most shocking thing of all was that Matt _let him do it_ , even bowing his head to help get the shirt off, and wiggling out of the jeans himself once he understood what was happening.

It made Foggy's chest hurt, how much trust he had in him, how eager he was to do what Foggy wanted. To please him. To _be there._

"Okay, buddy, it's gonna be cold." Foggy didn't give Matt a chance to bolt. He grabbed him by the wrist and pushed him in, suppressing the reflex to slam the door shut and hold Matt in there like he was some kind of flipped-out cat.

The flipped-out cat behavior lasted about five seconds before Matt realized what was happening, that he was getting doused in water that wasn't going to cover him in a skin infection, and then he was _all fucking about it_. He let out that breathy little laugh of his and pushed his face into the spray, grinning, unfazed by the temperature.

Foggy let out a breath of relief that curled itself around his mouth, forming a smile. "There. Now you won't look like you're totally made of mud and ash." He had a little bit of soap, but decided to save it until most of the filth had been rinsed away, bubbling on the floor, clogging at the edges of the drain. For a while he considered trying to give Matt direction from the outside of the shower, but he graduated to stepping in and helping because Matt was much more interested in the sensation of the water hitting his skin than anything else. And Jesus, if he'd been _gaunt_ before, Foggy was going to have to invent a new fucking term. If not for the tightly corded muscle and sinew, Matt would be fucking skeletal. Far worse than he was before his brain got smashed into a hundred pieces. Foggy wondered what he'd eaten to survive.

"At least let me get your hair, buddy." His clothes were getting soaked. He didn't care.

Matt's hair was tangled, matted, and it took the longest time just to get all the clumps of dirt out. Foggy supposed he could shave it all off, but Matt would have probably preferred to have something over his face-- his eyes, specifically. Right now he seemed incapable of giving a shit about what he looked like, but maybe that would come back, just like his speech had. And Matt-- the Matt before all this-- did _not_ like people to see his eyes. Worried about alienating people, putting them off with a stare that didn't focus or track.

Maybe soon he'd start worrying about it again. It'd been a long time since Matt had been around anyone that wasn't Foggy, or another feral.

"Jeez, how do you even get this much dirt _on_ you?" Foggy asked idly as he scrubbed the soap into Matt's skin and scalp. He still wasn't very invested in doing it himself, only openly enjoying the feeling of the water on him. And, well, if Matt wasn't going to remember, or care, either was he. "You're all scratched up." It looked like they'd been done by _fingernails_. The other ferals, he assumed.  They hadn't welcomed his company, either.

"Scratch?" Matt was gathering water into his cupped palms and letting it flow through his fingers, utterly fascinated. "Foggy. It f... it feels."

"Feels what, buddy?" He was _very sure_ what he was currently getting out of Matt's shoulder wasn't dirt or ash. It looked like rust. What the hell?

"Ngh. Co--cold." Another new word, dredged up from the shredded remains of his mental dictionary. Awesome.

But shit, yeah, he was shivering. "Want to get out?"

"No! No, no." Matt shook his head. His hair flopped everywhere, and he did it again, studying the sensation. "It's..." he grunted. Fuck, this wasn't getting any easier for him. Foggy tried not to think about it. "Good. Feels good."

Well, it was definitely a statement instead of a syllable. That was something, right?

"Almost done, buddy." Foggy had used the rest of his soap. It didn't matter. Matt made a grumbling noise as Foggy got around to his face. The scar from the flare gun was still there, buzzing up under his right eye, across his temple, creating a bald pale-pink line through his hair. He'd obviously picked at it as it healed, which made it look a lot worse. Foggy tried to quash the nauseated feeling in his gut as he looked at it. _He'd_ done that. _He'd_ fired that flare. An inch in the other direction, and he would have taken Matt's eye out-- and probably killed him, either from the force of the projectile or infection. He swallowed, and forced geniality into his tone. "Look at you, you're almost presentable."

"Presentable, what is this?"

"It means people can look at you and not want to run away."

Matt was chewing on his lip, thinking about the words, when Foggy reached across him, turning the water off. He frowned at its absence, but didn't reach for the tap to turn it back on, instead shivering and flicking his eyes somewhere around the drain.

"Okay, come on. You gotta get dry before you get too cold."

Foggy had gotten just as wet, except he was still clothed, but steadfastly ignored it as he went about drying his friend off. The towel was rough, nearly threadbare itself, and for a half of a second he felt bad about having to rub it in his friend's skin, but Matt, again, leaned into the contact. That tiny smile tugged at his lips.

It had been a long time since anything had touched him without the intent to hurt or maim. The thought made Foggy's throat close painfully.

"Let me find you some clothes. Wait here."

He went digging through the few articles he had, running each one between his fingers, testing the softness of the fabric. Settling on a hooded sweater and worn cargo pants that were probably way too big, he moved back to the bathroom. Foggy halted in the doorway at the sight that he returned to.

Matt was sitting on the floor, naked as anything, holding the towel, and _sobbing_. It was inaudible, but his chest was heaving with the force of it. He'd learned to cry, in _silence_ , _alone_ , in the world he was lost in. Probably to keep himself hidden, safe. Because ferals weren't _supposed_ to fucking cry, and it would make him a target for the _other_ wild bastards that lived out there. _God._

"Matt, Matt, what? It's okay, buddy." Foggy dropped down to the linoleum in front of him. Ran a hand up his goosebumped arm to tell him he was there, then frowned at the reflexive push back Matt did to increase the amount of contact. "What's the matter?"

"...Don't... don'know. Hurts."

"What hurts?"

Matt whined, made that choked noise of frustration, shaking his head once and rubbing at his chest. "Inside," he said, the only definition he could come up with, the only word he had in his splintered head that matched the sensation. He clutched the towel to himself and curled up a little.

Oh. Foggy felt his own face crumple. Whatever Matt was feeling, it wasn't physical, and he didn't _understand it_. The sickness had torn that out of him, too. Foggy felt sick again, but he swallowed it down, talking quietly. "I know it hurts. I'm here, though, okay?"

"Okay." Matt sniffed. His eyes rolled around. "Help?"

 _Jesus_. "I wish I could, Matty. I can't fix that kind of hurt." Foggy took the towel out of his hands and rubbed it over his shaggy head again. "I can be here for you, though. You don't have to be alone."

Matt sniffed, and hiccuped, and tilted his head around. Still shivering. "Cold," he said.

Foggy helped him with the hoodie-- far too big, but Matt bundled it around himself and smiled hesitantly at the sensation, so it was _perfect_ \-- and Matt yanked on the pants. Two sizes too short, but the waist was three sizes too large. Close enough.

"Here. I'm gonna wrap up your leg for real this time."

It only took a few minutes. Matt leaned down as if he could see what Foggy was doing, head tilted, but keeping himself still.

"Perfect. Don't mess with it, okay?"

Matt was already messing with it. "Okay." He ran his fingers over the gauze, studying the texture with his eyebrows crumpled.

Foggy dug through his box for another set of clothes for himself, watching from the corner of his eye as Matt got back up and moved carefully around the room, touching everything, getting used to the environment. Out of nowhere, he jumped, head twitching around crazily to focus on something.

"Shh, it's okay. You hear something?"

"Yes."

"What do you hear?"

A grunt. He didn't know. More than likely someone else in the shelter, yelling or firing a gun or whatever. Foggy couldn't hear it from where he was.

Matt moved further from the door anyway, into the corner where Foggy was digging through his clothes. "Safe," he said, brushing his fingers against Foggy's elbow. It was such a hesitant movement, but he did it like it was a reflex-- because it was. Foggy had guided him for years. He just didn't remember.

"Yeah, you're safe. I locked the door. Nobody's gonna come in."

Matt relaxed marginally, dropping his hand. It brushed against the steel frame of Foggy's cot, and he twisted to investigate, face crumpling in confusion, running his fingers over the metal parts with that same curious fascination he'd had with the water in the shower. Like it was something he'd never encountered before.

Technically, it was.

"Foggy, what?"

"What?" He was yanking his wet, muddy shirt off and pulling on a sweater.

Matt rolled his tongue around in his mouth and tried again. "Foggy, what is this?"

"That's my bed, man. It's where I sleep."

"Sleep," Matt repeated, tracing the shape of the bolts holding the thing together with his fingernails.

"You know what that is?"

"Yes."

Foggy hung his pants over the back of his chair to dry and yanked on another pair. "You tired?"

Matt was moving onto the blankets, feeling each one with the palms of his hands. He was gonna hate the woolen one on the bottom. "Tired, what is this?"

Of course he wouldn't have a definition for that. He'd stubbornly refused to listen to it _before_ he'd been lobotomized. "It means you want to sleep."

"Sleep. Yes."

"Go ahead, man." It looked like Matt hadn't slept since he'd gone full-mindfuck. Foggy realized he'd feel a lot better if the guy _did_ get some sleep. And then some food in him. And an antibiotic injection. And ten million other things he needed but didn't get to have living out in the fucking mud for three months.

Matt stretched himself out on the cot, lazily, gathering all the blankets around himself like a nest. His hazy little smile came back. _Fuck yeah, blankets_ , Foggy imagined he'd say in his head, or out loud, if he knew the words.

Foggy grabbed the computer chair and sat down on it, rolling it closer to the cot with his feet. "Comfy?"

"Comfy, what is this?"

"It means it feels good."

"Yes." Matt flopped over on his stomach, pushing his face into the pillow. "Smells."

"Bad?"

"...Good."

Right, because it smelled like Foggy. And Foggy smelled like antiseptic, charcoal, and gunpowder. Or he had his own unique smell that Matt just _knew_. He wondered what it was like. He wondered what else Matt could fucking smell on him and in the air inside the shelter and out in the courtyard.

"Hey, Matty?"

"Hngh?"

"...Welcome back."

Matt huffed and burrowed in deeper, then went still. He was asleep in goddamn _minutes_. Foggy knew this because the fucker started snoring. And probably drooling all over his clean bedding. How long had it been since he'd fucking slept? Since he'd had a _safe place_ to sleep in?

It was just questions on top of questions on top of questions, and Foggy didn't really care if he ever really got answers to them. He had Matt again, and it was enough. It was more than enough.

\---

"Foggy."

_Fuck off, I'm sleeping._

"F-Foggy."

_Seriously. I'm sleeping. I need to sleep. I want to sleep for two weeks._

"Fog. Foggy. Fog."

_Go away. Just go away._

A gentle prod to his ear. He swiped at it clumsily. His back fucking _hurt_. His neck felt worse. What the fuck? Had he gotten in a fistfight in his sleep?

"Foggy."

Grumbling, he turned his head-- he was face-first on some sort of soft platform-- and opened his eyes. Matt was an inch away, eyes twitching around, poking him in the fucking ear.

Foggy jerked upright with a gasp, suddenly very much awake, glancing around wildly. His surprise also surprised Matt, who flinched back, but didn't flee. "What-- what? What the fuck?" Oh, of course, he'd fucking passed out while staring at his friend sleeping like a total creeper.

"Foggy, sleep."

"Yeah, no shit I was 'sleep'. What fucking time is it?" He knew Matt couldn't answer, so he fumbled to push his sweater away from his watch. Late afternoon. What the hell, he'd slept for fucking _hours_. So had Matt, apparently, who was still cocooned amongst what appeared to be every blanket ever manufactured. "God. I _really_ didn't mean to do that."

Matt yanked a blanket over his face. "Hungry," he grumbled.

Well, _that_ was a word that Foggy hadn't taught him, which meant he'd collected it out of the shredded, scattered remains of his own mental dictionary. It must have been something he was really, _really_ familiar with. Which made Foggy feel especially bad.

"Yeah, let me get you something to eat, bud."

He pushed himself up and out of the chair, groaning as half of his joints popped like fucking bubble wrap. Everything just fucking hurt. Sleeping on a computer chair was _never happening again_. He hoped Matt was still okay with sharing a bed. Foggy guessed _yes_.

Matt lifted his head out of the mess of blankets, gaze somewhere near the legs of the table. He yawned, grumbling, but didn't move to pull himself out of the cot. His head still tilted in Foggy's direction, though. "Foggy, okay?"

"Huh? I'm fine. My back hurts, man."

"...Foggy, hurts?" Jesus, he sounded _worried_. Extremely worried. Over a sore back from sleeping in a computer chair. The more things change.

"I'm fine, Matty."

He huffed, and it looked like he might lie down and go back to sleep, but he got up out of the mess on the cot instead. His left leg shivered, either in pain, or because of the virus, when he swung his legs off the cot. Matt hissed when he put pressure on it.

"No, no, stay there. Keep your leg elevated. It'll help with the pain."

"...Elevated?"

"Just... Matt, just lay back down. It's okay. I'm going to get you something to eat."

Matt did as asked, even though his face was screwed up in a look-- oh, God. Great.

The Pout.

He thought he'd never see it again. He would have been glad to never see it again.

He nearly cried when he saw it again.

"I'm gonna lock the door, okay, Matty?" His voice was shaky. "Don't answer it. For anyone. Can you do that for me? Do you understand?"

Matt's eyes rolled around in his head. He did it a lot, Foggy realized, when he was thinking about what to say, like he wasn't blind and the word was actually in the air somewhere around him, and all he had to do was look hard enough to find it. "Foggy, yes."

"I'll only be gone a few minutes."

Matt was scrambling back to his feet the second his hand hit the doorknob. Foggy sighed, and turned, moving back to the cot. "No, buddy, you need to _stay here_." He tapped the blankets with a finger. Could Matt sense that? Probably.

"Foggy, why?"

"Because you'll be safe here."

Matt scratched a scrape on his chin as he hunted down and caught the word in his head. He reached out slowly and touched Foggy's hand. "Foggy. You're _safe_." A whole phrase. He even put emphasis into part of it, even if it was the wrong part. What a champ.

He was still wrong, though. "Oh, no, no. You can't come."

"Foggy, why?"

"It's... the other people, out there, they... they won't be as nice to you as I am. They're... the others like you? They've been hurting the people here. They won't trust you, Matty." He couldn't tell him that these people were the ones that had put arrows in him, or shot indiscriminately at him to scare him off. Matt didn't need to be more nervous than he already was. "I don't want you to get hurt, buddy."

Matt's expression crumbled as he processed the words. Fuck. "I'm... not good?" He didn't understand this concept at all. Of course he wouldn't. He didn't remember nearly snapping Foggy's neck in the apartment, either. Or at least Foggy assumed not, or he'd still be trying to do it.

"No. No, no, Matty, you're good. Of course you're good. I just... I want you to stay here. Can you do that for me, buddy? Please?"

"...Yes." He looked unsure. His voice was small.

"Just... stay here." Foggy backed up to the door again, then opened it, locking the doorknob from the other side before shutting it and making sure it was locked. He let out a breath, and rubbed his face for a few minutes, resting his forehead against the door. Foggy took five seconds, then pushed away from his room, and started down the hallway.

\---

Right. _Step one: antibiotics._

The infirmary was as empty as it usually was whenever nobody was hurt. Foggy typically spent quite a bit of time there, but not today. He zeroed in on the medicine cabinet, grabbing a plastic-wrapped syringe on his way through. The injectable antibiotics he typically saved for people who couldn't fucking drink for one reason or another, because he had no idea when he'd ever get more, but he figured this was a pretty good reason.

He read the back of the bottle-- how much did Matt fucking weigh? He went with 'around 120'-- and drew up a dosage, then swapped out the needle for a new one and stashed the syringe in his pocket. Foggy also grabbed a bottle of Tylenol, just in case he could convince Matt to take it. He might be able to. Matt did not seem to have much fight in him when it came to Foggy.

Which was worrying, and relieving.

Foggy turned off the lights in the infirmary as he left, shutting the door quietly.

\---

_Step two: food._

The kitchen-slash-cafeteria-but-really-just-a-fucking-garage was packed with people. Foggy chewed on his tongue and he slipped inside, wondering how much he could grab without being seen.

"Hey, Frank!" Jack hollered at him from across the room.

Foggy waved, and kept walking. _Stop talking to me, stop talking to me, stop talking to me._ What did they have for lunch? Did it matter? He piled a few sandwiches on a paper plate, stuffed a bag of chips and a bottle of water in his pocket, and marched right the fuck to the exit. _Step three: fucking avoid Karen like the plague._

Karen cut him off as he entered the hall and he nearly had a fucking heart attack.

"Jeez-- _Karen_ , goddamnit, don't _do_ that!"

"I was calling you the whole time you were in there."

Foggy grunted. "Okay. Sorry, I didn't hear you. What's, uh, what's up?"

She looked at him with narrowed eyes. Fuck. "Why are you so jumpy, Frank?" _Fuck._ "Did something happen?" _Fuck!_

"Nope, no, nothing at all." Foggy wanted to stab himself. Why was he _so fucking bad at this shit what the fuck_. "Just... not feeling too well. So I'm gonna... yeah. Back to my room." Matt might be trying to climb out the window by now. "Bye."

Karen turned her head and watched him go, her face as empty as ever-- except maybe her eyebrows, pinched together just a bit. "Okay. Bye."

Foggy barely heard her. He tried to swallow the feeling of his heart climbing out of his damn throat. Jesus. If she wasn't watching him, he would have started sprinting, but as it were, he at least waited until he was around the corner before booking it back to his room as quickly as he could.

\---

He opened the door carefully, swallowing his gasp when he didn't see Matt immediately-- no, no, there he was, on the bed, curled up against the wall, buried in the blankets with his knees to his chest. He looked very small. Foggy huffed a breath of relief, and Matt was unevenly vaulting across the space to him before the door was shut. His eyes were wet. Fuck.

"Foggy," he laughed, that strange breathy thing, pushing their foreheads together, just like when they'd first found each other. Kind of like a hug. A weird, half-feral-best-friend-hug. It should not have felt as awesome as it did.

"...Why are you crying, buddy?"

"Hurts," he explained, and that's as far as he got before he realized there was food. His whole body stiffened up like a bear trap. He didn't grab for any of it-- how polite-- but his eyes darted ceaselessly around the area of the plate.

Foggy felt himself smile, although his brain was turning over the word _hurt_ again, remembering the shower earlier. Another thing that hurt him, but he couldn't figure out. Foggy could. He thought he'd been abandoned. _Again_. "Here. It's for you."

The plate was gone in half a second and Matt fucking inhaled the sandwiches in three, grabbing them with his fingers, shoving them in faster than he could chew. It made a really gross noise.

"Jesus, dude."

Matt had eaten every fucking crumb. His tongue even flicked out and found the one that had landed on his facial hair. He lifted his head. "Hngh?"

"When's the last time you ate?"

"Hngh." He turned the paper plate over like there might be something hidden underneath, then went to chewing the flavor off of his fingers. His eyes flicked around as he thought about his answer. It was depressingly predictable. "Can't... mm, don'know."

Foggy frowned to himself. It didn't look like Matt had eaten _anything_ , for weeks. Maybe he hadn't. "Are you thirsty?"

"Thirsty. Yes."

He gave him the bottle, half-curious if Matt would know what to do with it. He did, but he didn't screw the top off, he _ripped_ it off, and sucked it down about as fast as he'd eaten the food.

"God, Matt, not so fast, you'll get sick."

"Won't."

Two minutes later, he whined, "Hurts," and Foggy had just enough time to snatch up his paper-grocery-bag-with-a-plastic-bag-inside-of-it trash can and shove it under Matt's face before he horked everything right back up again. It looked about the same. Matt heaved, confused, trying to figure out what had just happened to him. "Foggy, why?"

"You ate too fast. I fucking told you." Great, now he had to somehow find more food without looking super fucking suspicious. "Sorry, buddy."

He gagged, and pawed violently at his nose. Foggy remembered a comparison of menthol smoke to Brillo pads and sighed. Matt clutched his stomach, gagged again, dry-heaved. Spittle trailed out of his mouth and Foggy tilted the bag to catch it. "Hurts."

"Yeah, puking will do that to you." Well, now he had a cover story for the illness he lied to Karen about, it just wasn't his vomit he'd be using. Decoy vomit. Jesus, only with fucking _Matt_ would something like this happen to him. "You okay?"

Matt swallowed, swallowed again, and coughed. Rubbed his mouth, rolled his eyes around. Looking for words. "Yes. Okay." Simple words. Foggy tried not to worry about that.

"Tough guy." He patted Matt's back, and took the bag away.

Matt reached for it. "Foggy, no. I want."

Oh, _gross_. How could this man be so gross? He wished he could go back in time and tell his past self about this. Past-Matt would definitely puke. Temporal vomiting. What the fuck. "Ha- _ha_ , _not_ happening, that is absolutely disgusting, what is the matter with you?"

"Hungry."

"Um, no. This is no longer for eating."

Just what the fuck had he needed to eat to survive?

Matt's face fell. The Pout again. God fucking dammit. Foggy took the bag away-- far away, out the hall and into the dumpster-- and came back with the packet of chips. Matt ate them, very slowly, and continued to pout. It did not graduate to The Mope.

Foggy watched him sitting on the cot with his head cocked, like the sound of his own chewing was interesting to him. ...Wait, was he forgetting something?

Oh, _shit_ , right, the antibiotics. He turned and dug into his pocket, pulling the syringe out, moving for his first aid kit to grab the alcohol. As soon as Foggy stepped in his direction with the needle in his hand, Matt jerked his head up and toward him. His breathing quickened and his eyes flitted around in all directions as he inched backwards on the cot.

Foggy stopped short, frowning. "Whoa, whoa, it's okay, Matt. Come on."

He jerked his head in a harsh shake. "Foggy, no."

"It's antibiotics. That's all it is."

" _No_."

He didn't move closer to the cot. Matt could definitely overpower him if the needle made him panic. Looking at the guy now, Foggy guessed he was about five seconds from that exact thing happening.

"Listen, it's not gonna do anything. It's going to stop your leg from getting infected."

"Foggy, no. Don't want."

"What do you think it's going to do, buddy?"

"...Don'know." He didn't budge. "Don't want."

Foggy felt his own face screwing up in thought. Matt knew needles were trouble. He didn't know what they did, but he remembered that it was unpleasant. It was something that had rolled over from his last life, and he didn't even realize it. Foggy thought back to all the times he'd sedated him while he was on the plateau, and wondered. Had it carried over because that was when it had happened, when he was more animal than anything else?

Matt's brain was the biggest goddamn mystery he'd ever been a part of. And he'd been a _fucking lawyer_. But he was gonna fucking unlock it, lay it bare, and pick out all the shards of Matt he could find and put them right back together, because _fuck_ that virus for trying to take Matt away from him. Foggy was gonna drag him back every step of the way, just like he said he would.

Still, the guy needed the fucking shot. "Matt. Listen. It's not going to hurt you. It's not gonna put you to sleep. Okay? It's gonna stop you from getting sick." Foggy took a step closer, and Matt shrank down against the cot, shivering. He left the needle on the table, and moved again. "You know I wouldn't hurt you, right?"

"Foggy, yes." It was muffled.

"I can't really do anything to prove it to you, Matty. You're just gonna have to trust me." He sat on the cot, carefully, and Matt didn't shy away, which he took as a good sign. "You trust me, don't you?"

"Foggy, yes." A little less muffled.

"Let me give you the shot, then. It's not sedatives. It won't make you sick."

Matt grumbled, then huffed out a sigh, and pulled himself up from the cot. His hair was a fucking mess again, which actually helped, because the few fragments of Matt's terrified expression that he could see through it were bad enough. Foggy wasn't sure he could take the whole image.

"You okay, buddy?"

Matt sniffed-- god dammit, he'd made him _cry_ , what a shitty fucking friend he was-- and tilted his head. "Foggy, yes."

"Awesome. Give me your arm?"

He held it out obediently. Even though it was his right arm, it still shook, just with nervousness instead of neurological damage. Foggy got it over with as quickly as he could, wiping the area with alcohol-- Matt's nose wrinkled-- and putting the needle in with a well-practiced gentleness.

"There. All done. Not so bad, right?"

He rubbed the spot where the needle had gone in, frowning. "Smells."

"Yeah, the alcohol. Sorry. The last thing you want is to get a bacterial infection on an injection site that's there to prevent a bacterial infection."

Then he spent forty-five minutes explaining what every other word in those statements meant.

\---

"Foggy, what is this?"

"That's... Matt, for the fourth time, that's _foam_.  From the computer chair. The one you've been ripping apart all fucking day." _All fucking day_.  Karen was going to come investigate soon, he knew it. He didn't have the slightest clue what to tell her. How to explain this. He was definitely going to have to lie.

"Mm? Not use."

"Like that matters! I _do_ use it, but I can't right now, because you've been spinning and chewing on it all day long."

"Foggy, not chewing."

"Ugh, same difference!"

"Difference, what is this?"

Matt was really a brilliant student. He picked up on things quickly. Underneath everything else, he was still that studious, eager, determined little shit Foggy had met in college.

The problem wasn't Matt's ability. Foggy was just a really shitty teacher.

"It means, like... something that's one color, and something that's another color, two diffe-- two _separate_ colors, not the same." He often came up with the definition halfway through his explanation, which didn't help at all. "It means not the same."

Matt started spinning in the chair again. "Color, what is this?"

 _Fuck!_   "It's... what things look like."

Matt tilted his head and gave him a dubious look. As well as he could, at least, while spinning, and trying to get his face in Foggy's direction. He ended up glaring at half the wall and then the cot. Close enough.

"You don't believe me?"

"Foggy, no."

"I can't... really explain it. To you."

Matt looked hurt. His spinning slowed. "Me, why?"

"Because. Uh. You can't see color, Matty. You can't see anything."

Total fucking confusion. "See. See a _lot_."

"Not with your eyes, though, buddy."

Matt touched his face, as if to make sure they were still there. "Foggy, not good?" Because as far as he knew, they were only there for decoration. How the hell was he supposed to explain that to him?

"They're..." he sighed. "They don't work, Matty."

"Don't work?" he echoed, which meant he didn't understand, and had spoken the same words back on reflex. He thought for a long minute, but couldn't work it out. "Foggy, why?"

"You... you had an accident. A long time ago."

"Did?"

"Yes." Foggy watched his reaction-- no, he didn't remember it. Gone, like most everything else. Replaced by the animal that had torn into his head and sheltered in it, pushing all other things out. The animal that Matt was, and wasn't.

Foggy was torn. "Yeah. It took your eyesight, Matty."

He stopped spinning entirely then, a frown climbing down his face. "Took...?"

Shit, he was upset. Evasive maneuvers. "It's okay, Matt. Listen. It took your eyesight, but it gave you a _lot_ more. You know, how you can hear my heart? And everyone out in the hall? I can't do that. But you can. That's _why_ you can."

Matt folded his arms over the back of the chair and pressed his mouth into them, thinking. Foggy gave him time to decipher the words-- there were a lot of them. He pushed gently from foot to foot, shifting himself a few inches, back and forth.

Foggy leaned in closer. "You're very special, Matty. Did you know that? There's never been anyone like you." In more ways than one. The senses were one thing, but to survive the sickness and come crawling back with half your facilities intact? "You're special," he reiterated, "and you're very important."

The reply was muffled by his arms. "Important...? Foggy, me?"

"Yes. You're..." he sighed, and rubbed his face, reaching across the short few feet to touch the back of Matt's hand, "...you're important to me. Okay?"

Matt lifted his head from his arms, frowning. "Foggy, why?"

Of course he wouldn't know his importance. Of course he wouldn't know how much Foggy had looked for him. How hard he'd cried at his absence. How much he'd wanted to give up.

"...You're my friend, Matty."

"Friend?"

"Yes. My best friend."

Matt didn't understand. His eyebrows furrowed in that way they did, and he pushed his lips into his arms again. He rolled his eyes around and Foggy waited. "...Miss-missed me?"

 _Good_ , a connection. Evidence of a train of thought. Pieces falling into place. Foggy tried not to grin like an idiot when he heard it. "Yeah. Yeah, I did. A lot. You were gone a long time."

"Missed you."

"You told me. When you found me in the Park." Foggy prayed he remembered.

He did. "Yes." A look crossed Matt's face, slight panic. "Won't leave," he said, sharp and hurried. His hand turned and he grabbed Foggy's arm, gently tugging him closer, climbing out of the chair. He looked so worried, so afraid. Foggy felt his expression crumbling. Fucking hell, Murdock.

Matt moved to push their foreheads together, but Foggy twisted instead and burrowed his face into Matt's neck and sobbed like all those times Matt had done the same. He cried until he felt sick, and then kept doing it. Matt held him tightly, all corded muscle, all gentleness in harsh and broken lines. He never said anything-- he probably didn't know what to say-- but he didn't move. He didn't run. He knew where he had to be.

_I'll always come back to you._

He had. He fucking _had_.

And Foggy would have been absolutely fine if he got to stay there the rest of the goddamn day, the rest of his _goddamn life_ , but instead Matt jerked away suddenly, head twitching around, eyebrows tightening. Eyes doing that flick-flick thing they did whenever he was _really_ listening.

Karen. _Shit._ Matt heard her first, and Foggy heard her too late, right as she got to the door and knocked.

"Frank, are you in there?"

Foggy shoved Matt away like a total fucking douchebag, like they'd been caught kissing behind the bleachers or some shit, and Matt dropped back into the chair with a soft noise. "Fo--"

Foggy lurched forward and slapped a hand over Matt's mouth. "Shut up," he hissed, ignoring the shock on Matt's face, the confusion, "you need to be very quiet, now, okay? Can you hide in the bathroom? Nod for me." Except Matt wasn't totally sure on what 'nod' meant, so he didn't do anything.

Karen was calling into the door. If she could sound concerned, she probably would. "Frank? I can hear you in there, you know."

He got up, yanked Matt to his feet, "Seriously, stay fucking quiet, man," and threw him into the bathroom, shutting the door. He raised his voice. "Yeah, just a second, Paige." Pushing his hair out of his face, he sighed, then unlocked the door and opened it a crack.

She stared in at him, all dead-faced and severe. The exact opposite of Matt, which was strangely hilarious and _really sad_.  "You okay?" As always, there was barely inflection in her words.  At least Matt _tried_.

"What? Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Just, you know. Ate something bad."

"Well, can I come in?"

 _No, no you fucking can't, fuck no, get the hell out of here, fuck off, fuck off._ "Um... yeah." He pulled the door open the rest of the way. "Uh. Kind of a mess in here. Sorry."

"That's okay," she said, glancing over the dried mud on the floor. "I need to talk to you. Do you have a minute?"

Foggy stared at the bathroom door. "...Yeah. Yeah, I have a minute."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _No hope, no harm. Just another false alarm._  
>  The Smiths


	8. psychobabble

Frank was acting weird.

He was usually kind of weird-- even after three months, she still wasn't sure that the emotions on his face were the ones she thought he was using-- but this was different. Like he'd been caught kissing someone behind the school bleachers. She _thought_ she remembered an expression like that, at least. From a movie.

Karen ignored it, though, just like she ignored the nervous fidgeting that he was doing, the rumpled mess his room had somehow devolved into, and the sick-sweet smell of vomit that hung in the air. "If you were throwing up, why'd you eat?"

"Oh, um, I thought it would help."

"Has it stopped yet?"

"Hm? Yeah. No. No, it hasn't." He was staring at the bathroom door. "I think I just need a day and some sleep, so, uh, yeah."

Karen attempted a frown and followed his gaze to the bathroom. Frank barked out an surprisingly loud, rushed laugh and started talking. Awkwardly. Could he _be_ any more shifty? She knew what _that_ looked like. Hadn't he always fucking sucked at this? Hadn't Matt been the better liar?

Of course he had, because he'd been able to hide heightened senses and vigilante activity from Frank for goddamn years.

"Hey! So, I know it smells in here, so let's talk out in the hall, yeah?" He tried to guide her out the door.

She flinched from his touch and put on the brakes. "What the hell are you hiding?" She didn't have the time to pussyfoot around these damn questions. Her topic of conversation-- what she'd come here to say-- went on the backburner. Right now, there was something a little more important, something she needed to figure out. Karen felt a stirring in her gut that she didn't recognize, faintly familiar and entirely unwelcome.

"No-nothing! Jesus, Karen, nothing."

"Paige. I don't believe you."

"I don't care!" Frank winced at his own words, at his own volume. He tried pushing her out the door again. "Let's go, okay?"

She rounded on him, aggressive-- which she did because she knew it worked-- and forced him back into the room. Karen reached behind her and shut the door. Her voice was a low hiss. "Frank. What are you hiding?" If he'd come across a cache of food or weapons and was hoarding it for himself, she was going to be _pissed_ , prior work experience and emotional IBS _(his words, not hers, don't think I didn't hear you mumbling that to Jack a month ago, asshole)_ be damned.

"No. No, I didn't find anything."

"Yes, you did. You're hiding it. Is that why you're sick? Eat something expired that should have been checked first?"

"What the fuck, _no_ , Karen, I didn't--"

She went for the bathroom door. He was hiding something in there. Frank all but tackled her, wrapping his arms around her waist, pulling her away from it. A shocked growl came from her throat-- he didn't _grab_ her, he _never grabbed her_ , _nobody was allowed to fucking grab her_ \-- and she whirled on him and shoved him away. "Get _off!_   Frank, you can't _do_ shit like this." He was circling her carefully, putting himself between the bathroom and her again. What the hell?  "You want Eric to find out? He's supposed to be back today."

There was a noise from behind Frank. Behind the door. It might have been the pipes settling. It might have been something else. He planted his feet and didn't move. "I didn't find anything, okay? No food or water or nukes or whatever the fuck you think might be hidden out there. Eric doesn't need to know anything. Because there _isn't_ anything!" He stared her down, not moving from his spot, almost looking-- what was that, protectiveness? God, she didn't fucking know. "Karen, you _gotta go_ ," he hissed.

"No, I don't."

"I'll puke all over you."

"No, you won't."

"Seriously, Karen--"

She let out a sharp sigh and stomped forward. Frank tried to stop her; she shoved him aside again, and he yelped.

The bathroom door crashed open before she could even touch it, and something lunged out at her, _fast,_ but she had better reflexes than most, and slipped to the side, going for the knife she always kept sheathed at her back for this very fucking reason.

Whatever-- _whoever_ \-- it was, they recovered whip-fast, and surged at her again, growling. Something struck her in the temple; lights burst in her eyes. Frank yelled something. She heard a snarl, and then there were painfully strong hands against her, one at the back of her head shoving her face-first into the wall, the other digging fingernails into her wrist, twisting her arm, pinning her there.

It had all happened in less than a few seconds. She panted into the faded paint on the wall, panic bubbling in her throat, and bucked, but Jesus, it was _strong_ \--

A feral, her mind supplied, belatedly. No human made noises like that. There was a _feral_ in Frank's room, _in the shelter_.  It was going to kill both of them. Jesus Christ, she had to-- 

"Not yours!" came a snarl, deafening, in her right ear, rattling her thoughts out of her head. Fury, underscored with that inhuman percussive rumble, courtesy of the virus. _"Not yours!"_

She heard Frank shout something again, and the pressure relented slightly. Karen took her opportunity and moved before the hands were even completely off of her, whirling, drawing the knife-- yes, it was human, at least appearing so, which meant there was a throat she could cut. How the fuck had it even _gotten in?_

As she swung, its hands shot out like it knew the move before she'd even made it, and stopped her. Strong fingers closed over her grip on the knife. That furious growl blasted at her, hot and wet, and all she saw was shaggy dark hair falling into a pale and twisted face before she was being thrown, up over a shoulder and onto the floor. The breath in her lungs left her body with a sharp sound, and the knife was ripped from her hand, and then the blade was pressed against her throat. Something dug into her gut, pinning her again. A knee.

It was so fucking _fast_. She hadn't stood a half of a fucking chance against it. Karen twisted and growled reflexively at being pinned, trying to get her lungs to suck in air again, panic roiling thick and dark in the back of her head-- it was going to hurt her, it was going to hurt everyone, it was going to--

Why wasn't Frank fucking _helping_ \--

"Mine! _Mine!_ " the feral barked from above her, wiry and gaunt but strong, dark hair in disarray, fury paling its surprisingly clean face. Panic hissed in her ears like an ocean. _No._ She wasn't _anybody's_. She would _die_ before she belonged to anyone. This fucking feral was going to get his dick ripped off and she was going to _laugh._

Karen thrashed, finally sucking in a short breath, but the animal held her still, growling, pressing with the knife, but not cutting. It glared at her, and its eyes were a hazy brown, furious but _familiar_ , so goddamn familiar, she recognized them, the color and the emptiness and the way that they--

_I'll keep you safe, Karen._

_I'd give anything to see the sky one more time._

_There's been something in your voice._

\--didn't focus.

Her thoughts rolled over in confusion, stilled suddenly, stopped working. Time came to a complete and shattering stop.

"Oh, what the _fuck_ ," she hissed. _"Matt?!"_

But then Frank was there, hands on Matt's shoulders, yanking him off of her, babbling in his ear, "Stop, stop, stop, Matty, stop, she won't hurt you, she won't hurt you! Matt, drop it!"

Matt listened. The _feral_ listened. He was panting, teeth still bared, but he obediently tossed the knife to the floor. His focus on her didn't break, even if he wasn't looking at her with his eyes. He focused with his _whole body_ , turned in her direction, left hand twitching violently at his side, that low growl-- _I'm coming for you, I'm coming for you, I'm going to fucking kill you_ \-- rattling in his chest.

Feral. _Matt was feral_. He wasn't dead. He wasn't a corpse in the Kitchen. Frank _lied to her_. Matt hadn't died, he'd gotten infected, he was _feral and he just tried to kill her._

Karen scrabbled back until she hit the wall, panting for breath. The sudden emotion in her voice was startling, but God, she was fucking _startled_.  "Holy-- Jesus, _Frank_ , what the _fuck_ \--"

"It's okay, it's okay! He won't hurt you--"

Her head was pounding, so that was a fucking lie. "What are you _doing_ , you need to _kill it_ \--"

Matt snarled at the offense, cutting her off. The sound echoed around in her brain and made the adrenaline in her body roil both bright and black in the corners of her vision as her breathing sped up. Frank grabbed Matt's shoulder and shook it, "Matty, stop, calm down, she won't hurt you," and the feral stopped just as quickly as he started, a frown crossing his face, covering that wild expression of total fury.

Then, he talked. He _talked_ , real words, in a real voice, soft, shaky. Weak. "Foggy. Who?" He handled the other man's name like it was two words and not one, his speech stumbling and inaccurate. It was nothing like the roar that was still ringing in her ears from earlier. It was nothing like the man she'd known two years ago.

"It's Karen, Matty, do you remember her? Jesus, dude, you could have killed her."

Matt made a strange movement, a sharp twitch of his head. A shake? It was like half his brain was paralyzed. Probably because _it was_. The fact that he wasn't still trying to kill her only worried her _more._ "No. Foggy, no." What was more dangerous than a feral that could feign harmlessness?

A feral that could feign harmlessness and hear your heartbeat from _three blocks away._

"That's okay. You will." Frank carefully slipped around until he was between the two of them, but Matt was still totally focused on her, grasping shakily at Frank's arm as it blocked his path. "Stay behind me, Matty." What the _fuck._

_Why hadn't she brought her gun?_

Karen was still trying to get her breathing under control. The burning panic in her head and body and the bubbling hot feeling of _something_ in her stomach wouldn't fade. "Why the hell did you bring him here, Frank? Are you totally _insane?"_ He had to be. It didn't matter who this feral was, who he'd been before, even if-- even if it was _Matt._ Even if he could _talk._ He was _contagious_ and he was going to get them all killed.

"I didn't have a choice, Karen," Frank was trying to explain anyway, walling Matt off from her, planting himself between her and the feral like the feral was the one in greater danger. _He was protecting the fucking animal._ "I found him in the Park. He was hurt. I had to do something!"

"So you brought him back here, and put everyone else in danger?"

"He's not-- okay, I know that last thing wasn't a good example, but he's _not_ dangerous. Not to me. Not to us. He would have killed me out there if he was." Obviously, he hadn't, and Matt's face twitched into a deeper frown at the words. "You came after me. He's... you _know_ him, Karen, he's _protective_ \--"

"Oh, great, so now he's just a guard dog? A guard dog with a contagious virus?"

She didn't take her eyes off of Matt. He didn't take his focus off of her. His hair was a mess around his face-- yes, brown, she had remembered correctly-- and while his panting had evened out, he still looked like he was a millisecond from pouncing her, ripping into her, filling her ears with that otherworldly _snarl_ and--

"Karen," Frank started, sharply, pulling her focus from the whirlwind in her head. "Deep breath. Calm down. He _won't hurt you_. And he isn't a _dog_. What is _wrong_ with you?"

"He _is_ a fucking _dog_ , _Frank_ , he's an _animal_ , you're-- _ah--!"_

She fell suddenly silent with a sharp gasp as Matt moved under Frank's arm. Every muscle in her body froze into ice as he slipped into a crouch and took her knife from the floor. He approached her, slow and deliberate, his head bowed.

Karen could see his jaw working beneath his facial hair like he was chewing on the words before spitting them awkwardly out. "S... Sorry," he blurted, like he'd forgotten how to talk. _(He had. All ferals did.)_   He turned the knife over in his hands and offered it out to her, handle first. "Won't..." he swallowed, let out a dry grunt, made a mumbling noise, "hurt you." A poor repetition of what Frank had just told her.

"It's a little late for that. You already did," she snapped, not moving any closer. She had never talked to a feral before. She had never been this _close_ to a feral, not since-- not since she'd almost lost half of her fucking face. The memory reared up in her head, roaring, and she bit hard on the inside of her cheek to try to ward it off. "Don't fucking _touch_ me, you piece of _shit_."

Matt flinched, shifting on his feet, bowing his head lower. "Sor-- sor-- sorry. Didn't..." he trailed off, and she could see his eyes start to roll around, like he was looking for something. "...Didn't mean. Couldn't..." another grunt, and he hissed a sigh. She knew that expression. Frank held it quite a lot, around her. He was _frustrated_. He couldn't figure out what he was trying to say.

"You spooked him, Karen, that's all," Frank said, nudging Matt forward a little more. "Take your knife back. He won't hurt you."

Karen reached out slowly, like she was approaching an electric fence that she wasn't sure was powered or not. She wrapped her fingers around the handle of the knife, and as soon as she was bearing its weight, Matt dropped his hand and backed away. It took everything in her not to lurch forward and stick it in him until he stopped breathing, until she had one less fucking monster to worry about.

Matt crept back around behind Frank, moving carefully. He was limping on his left leg. Late-stage, then. It didn't explain why he was talking or why he hadn't killed Frank and her and everyone else around him with that bright cutting rage that only an animal could possess.

"It's okay, buddy," Frank whispered, patting Matt's arm _(he was fucking touching it, how long had he been touching it, how long had he been touching that thing before touching her?)_ before letting out a breath. His face twisted. "Karen. You... you can't tell anyone. Okay?"

She took her gaze off of the feral for two seconds to give Frank a stare. "You're fucking kidding me, right?" Back to Matt. He had his head tilted away from her, standing there quietly, appearing docile. _Appearing._ That was the _key_   word, there. "You need to kill it."

"Him! He's not an it, Karen, Jesus Christ, he's _Matt._ "

"No, he isn't! He's _not!"_   She was pushing herself up against the wall, using it to help her back to her feet. Her legs didn't want to work correctly. "Frank, it _can't be here_. You are going to infect the entire goddamn shelter." She had the knife in her hand still, and she gripped it tightly. How quickly could she leap forward, shove Frank out of the way, and slice the feral's throat open before he killed both of them?

"Karen, stop, fucking-- just _stop_ , what does it look like to you, does it look like he wants to fucking kill you right now?" He was breathing hard, voice a low rumbling mumble, trying not to shout, trying not to draw attention. Matt stayed quiet.

Karen shook her head because the answer was obvious and she couldn't believe she had to explain it to him. "It doesn't _matter_. He's feral."

Frank took a breath. His voice tumbled out in a furious hiss. "Yeah, no _shit_ he's feral! I fucking took care of him while that goddamn disease tore his head apart! I was there when it took over, Karen--"

"Pai--"

"--No, _fuck you_ , I get to call you Karen, let me fucking finish-- he woke up in the middle of the night and tried to kill me, _he tried to strangle me to death, Karen_ , and I had to shoot him in the fucking face with a flare gun to get him off of me! Trust me, I know what it looks like when Matt wants to kill someone! And this is not fucking it!" His voice was rising out of its forced muffling.

Matt looked pained-- _pained_. Not physically. She still knew what that looked like. He brushed a hand along Frank's arm, and Frank pushed him gently away. Matt kept his head lowered, letting his hand drop weakly to his side, silent.

"How can it be so easy for you, after all he did? For _you_ , especially?"

"Frank, it's--"

" _I'm not done!_   This guy right here? He just fucking wiped out the alpha! He put a _piece of a power line_ through its _head!_   And you wanna know why? Because _I was there_. It attacked _me_. And Matt stopped it. You really think he's angling to kill a bunch of us?"

"The _virus_ , Frank--"

"No, _fuck_ that! I don't care! Who the hell do you think's been leaving you all those dead ones? He went after them because they went after _us_ , don't you fucking see that?!" He took a breath. He might not have done so in the last few minutes. "Look, you either calm the fuck down and help, or you refuse him, in which case, I'll go live with the blind bastard out in the Park. Fucking _gladly_. Fuck, we might even move to Boston. Good luck keeping your guys' _shit_ together without someone that can put a stitch in."

Frank was breathing hard. Matt was making a small noise, high and repetitive, in the back of his throat, like he was wounded. A whine. He was _whining_ , and he looked _worried_.  It didn't look very feral, that was true. But it didn't look like _Matt_ , either.

"Shh, Matty, calm down, I'm fine."

"Foggy, why?"

"I'm fine. It's okay." Frank answered Matt, but continued to glare at her, hand extended to one side, corralling the feral into the safety of the space behind him. She had never seen a look quite like it before, not on him, not on anyone. Total determination. Complete loyalty. Karen was _sure_ that was what she was looking at. Her mind wouldn't suggest anything else. "Well?" Frank lifted his other hand. "What are you going to do? Wanna try a run at him? 'Cause I'll stop you. Wanna see what happens when I get in the way?"

Karen thought about her choice for a long time, watching Frank stare her down, breathing hard, watching Matt brush weakly at his arm, trying to-- what, get him to calm down? That soft whine was still piercing the air, quiet but _irritating_. The snarl from earlier was still echoing in her head. _Not yours, not yours, mine, mine_. She could tell from where she was standing who belonged to who.

She hissed out a long breath and sheathed the knife behind her.

Frank huffed a short sigh. "See? Not so fucking hard, right?"

Her hands itched without the weapon in them. Frank relaxed visibly, but Matt did not. She noticed. His whining stopped, at least. What an awful noise.

"You fucking lied to me, Frank."

"No, really? I didn't want to tell you my best friend got infected when it's clear you take a whole shitload of glee from slaughtering ferals?" Frank took a step back, toward the chair at his desk. Matt stayed next to him like a second image. "What a surprise."

Karen felt her face do something funny. It itched, too. "You told me he was dead."

Matt started fiddling with the back of Frank's sleeve, silent. Fidgeting, that was something she could clearly remember, now that she saw it again. Even if it moved the same, looked the same, it was still an animal. It was still dangerous. "To be fair, Karen, I thought he was. I hadn't seen him in three months."

"Foggy, a lot," Matt mumbled, voice barely decipherable, half-obscured by Frank's shoulder.

"Yeah, buddy, it was."

Karen stared at them. "It can fucking talk. It's a feral that can _talk_." That was the last thing ferals did. They howled and roared and screeched, they didn't _carry conversations_. Not that Matt was. He sounded like he was fucking brain-dead.

" _He_ , Karen, Jesus. And tell me about it. _I'm_ still fucking figuring it out, myself."

"But it-- he doesn't remember me."

"Karen, he doesn't remember _shit_. I don't even know how he remembered _me_. That shit fucked him up, did something to his brain, but he's still _Matt_ , all right? Karen, he got infected _two years ago_. I know the life expectancy is like, four months, isn't it? He _survived_ it, do you understand that?"

That notebook. The fucking notebook she'd caught a glimpse of in Frank's bag. It wasn't about drugs, and it wasn't about himself. It was for _Matt._ He'd been tracking the sickness. She felt that deep and dark anger stir in her gut at herself for not recognizing it sooner.

"He caught it two years ago. And we _lived together,_ until three months ago. Slept together."

Her face made a weird movement. She'd never been so disgusted.

"Oh, my God, not like _that_ , Karen. Jesus. We lived in his apartment together, we shared a _bed_. And do I look feral to you? I never fucking caught it."

"You didn't--?"

"Look, he's done everything to me besides bite me and fuck me, and I'm not going insane trying to stab people with random shit, all right? Karen. I don't think..." Frank took a breath, and worried at his lip, like the next words were something he'd kept in his mouth for a very long time, "...I don't think Matt's contagious."

How could he not be? _How could he not be?_   "But he has it." Why wasn't that enough for Frank? Why was he being so fucking stupid? "He's infected." Matt's left arm and hand trembled, which was trademark. He couldn't remember anything, and had clearly lost his fucking mind, or most of it, which was trademark. He attacked things, which was--

Well. Attacking things had been Matt's trademark for a long time before this, apparently.

Karen pushed a hand down her face. She still wasn't moving closer to either of them. The knife was heavy at her back. Comforting. She kept her other hand loose and free so that she could draw it quickly if she needed to. She _really wanted to._

"I was there when he got bit, so yeah, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet." Frank moved back to sit heavily in his computer chair, and Matt slunk behind him, like his shadow, keeping as far away from Karen as she was from him. "Matt, you can sit on the bed, you know. You don't have to sit on the floor."

Matt grumbled and did the latter anyway, dropping into a cross-legged position next to Foggy's chair. His hair was still all over the place. Frank rolled his eyes and leaned over and tried to push it down, and she watched Matt's eyes flicker as he leaned back into the touch. What the _fuck_ , was he--

He was. He was _smiling_. It was the scariest thing she'd ever seen a feral do. Because ferals didn't _fucking smile._

Unless they were trying to get on your good side, trying to lull you into relaxing around them. Matt had always been an excellent liar, she knew. He'd lied a _lot,_ and she didn't know if he even realized how much of it she'd noticed. Watching Frank touch him like it was second nature looked like a man putting his arm in a primed bear trap.

He wasn't going to listen to her, though, and she knew that. Frank was going to learn it the hard way, when Matt turned on him and tore his goddamn throat out. And then they'd be out a medic.

Something else rippled in her head: _and she'd be out her Foggy_.  She shoved the thought down and out of her mind with a ferocity that calmed her with its familiarity. Her gut was churning, black and warm. The anger and adrenaline were still there, and those two she would be okay with, but other shit was starting to get in the mix now, shit she didn't like and didn't understand. As she watched the two of them, it got worse.

She spoke again. "It is him, isn't it?"

Frank's mouth twisted. "Who the fuck else would get infected, live six times the expectancy rate, then come back with half his goddamn head intact anyway?" Frank gestured at the man on the floor. "This motherfucker, that's who." He shook Matt's shoulders gently, and again, Matt smiled, apparently enjoying the interaction, like any other animal would. It made her blood run colder. "Say hi to her, man. You're gonna scare her if you just stay quiet all the time."

"Mm? Did," Matt grumbled out, quietly. His eyes flicked around the ground.

"You didn't say hi to her."

"Foggy, no. Hn." He took a moment to talk. He took a moment for every goddamn word. "Sc-scare. Scare her."

That feeling in her stomach faded to something blackened and charred and dead. She held back her sigh of relief at losing it.  "Yeah, he fucking scared me. He almost cut my throat open." She wasn't sure what had stopped him, besides Frank pulling him back and yelling at him.

"Not.  No," Matt spoke again, struggling for each syllable, his voice stumbling in its rush to get out of his mouth. If the virus had damaged him so badly neurologically that he couldn't fucking _talk_ and didn't even remember _who she was_ , why was Frank still _trusting_ him? "C-could-couldn't."

Karen remembered his gentle eloquence, before all of this, that soft voice, and forced the memory down. Not the same person. Not the same world. She couldn't confuse the two, because that's what Frank had done, and Frank was going to end up dead, very soon, from his mistake.

Matt's eyes were darting around, trying to find her. They never would. "Won't hurt you," he said, looking at some middle distance past the door behind her. "Won't hurt you."

He was still a liar. Not as skilled. She could see through it.

Frank smiled. "See? You're getting along swimmingly," he said, ridiculously, like she was a few minutes away from sprinting across the space and hugging the feral like it was still the man she worked for two years ago.

Not happening. Frank was a fucking psychopath. If only she'd brought her _pistol._

Matt's head tilted. "Swimmingly, what is this?" he asked, stumbling over the first word but spitting out the last three rapid-fire, clear as crystal, like he'd been saying them a lot.

"Swimmingly means good, Matty," Frank answered, and Karen realized that Matt probably _had_ been saying them a lot, because he didn't know what the fuck anyone was talking about anymore. He was trying to _learn_ , but his brain was no longer wired for that. The wires were twisted and bent back over each other and diverted only to instinct, the urge to maim and kill and _destroy._

Matt grumbled. "Mean 'good'?" He turned his face toward the other man. "Foggy. Use 'good'," he said, exasperated. As exasperated as an animal could sound, at least.

Frank snorted a chuckle. Karen didn't budge.

She watched Matt grab Frank's arm-- she thought for sure he'd flip Frank just like he'd flipped her, but, miraculously, he didn't-- and pull it toward himself, fingers tapping along. Karen primed her arm at her side, hoping she could draw her knife fast enough if Matt decided that he was done playing his stupid little game with them.

Matt didn't attack him, which was shocking. He instead unclasped Frank's watch and took it, holding it to his ear. Frank dove for it, and Matt jerked away, huffing strangely, like he couldn't get enough air.

"Matt, stop taking my fucking watch, you little shit."

"Foggy, slow."

"I know it's slow, you tell me that every time."

"Foggy, not watch."

Matt bounced to his feet. Karen jerked back against the wall, expecting violence, but his left leg faltered, probably the tremors, and it slowed him enough that she didn't immediately try to stab him. He wasn't going for either of them, instead lifting the watch out of Frank's reach. He made that short huffing noise again, and Karen realized it was a _laugh_. A quiet, airy little laugh. A poor cross between human and animal.

"It's not fair, you're taller." Frank turned his head and gave her a look that she-- surprise-- couldn't place. "He's not usually like this. Sorry."

_No, because he's usually trying to kill people. That's his job. That's his only job._

"Usually like this, sorry, sorry, Foggy," Matt rambled, nonsensical, still withholding the watch. Karen noticed how much he was simply repeating back what he'd just heard. That wasn't a difficult thing to do. A feral could probably do it if he tried hard enough. The one in front of her had certainly figured it out.

"What are you even talking about? Give me that." Frank couldn't reach it. His voice hardened. _"Matt."_

He snapped to attention at the harsh tone in Frank's voice, lowering his hands immediately. Karen watched, realizing what it meant, even if Frank didn't. Matt was trained. _He had a trained feral at his beck and call._ How the fuck had he managed that? How long had it taken him to do it?

"No fun." Matt gave the watch back. "Sorry?"

Frank started putting it back on his wrist, and Matt leaned down, some soft emotion wandering around his mouth, and pushed their foreheads together. "Yeah, yeah," Frank said, and Karen saw him _pushing back_ , and _smiling_ , and she shivered. "You're forgiven." He turned his head toward her as Matt moved away. He gave no explanation for the forehead-pushing. She wasn't sure she wanted one. "He's... um, awkward. And... curious."

"Uh. I see that."

No, that wasn't curiosity. It wasn't awkward friendliness. It was a rabid fucking dog rolling on its back for a scratch before leaping up and ripping your throat apart. It was a bear trap hidden in leaves that you didn't notice until it snapped your leg in half. It was a late-stage feral that you'd known before the world fell apart, while it was still a human being, and you were too busy focusing on what it used to be to see what the fuck it actually was.

"Frank," she started, but he looked over at her and frowned.

"Foggy. It's Foggy. If I have to hear you call me 'Frank' one more time, I'm gonna puke. And I don't wanna puke. Matt might try to eat it."

"Um, what?"

"Long story. Well, not really. But it's gross. So, just trust me on it. Keep your puke away from him." Frank-- not Foggy, _Frank_ \-- shrugged, waved toward the man on the cot. "See? He really isn't that scary, is he?"

Yes. Yes, he was. The gentleness and smiling and laughing made him the scariest feral she'd ever fucking seen in her life.

Matt was on the cot, running his fingers along the edges of the seams of a blanket, concentrating, like he'd find the whole world in there if he looked hard enough. He wouldn't find shit.

"At this moment? Um, I guess not." A lie. Karen was glad that she'd beaten the expressions off of her own face. She remembered Frank telling her that Matt knew what a lie sounded like, because of his heartbeat, or something insane like that. Matt didn't call her on it. Probably because her heart had been racing since that bathroom door had been flung open, and it hadn't slowed. Her face didn't shift, and she felt pride in herself for it. _Safety._

Frank talked again. "He steals watches and eats vomit. He's a cupcake."

Matt jerked up from the cot. "Cupcake, what is this?"

"I can't tell you, because you'll never get to have one, Matty. And that would be rude," he said, rolling his head in Matt's direction.

The feral grumbled. "...Dick."

"Um, who the fuck taught you that?!"

Matt didn't answer.

"Don't re-learn curse words, you asshole, you were doing _so good_."

_What the fuck_. Karen pushed her hands over her face again. She didn't know what to do. She really just didn't know how the fuck to proceed from here. Frank's outburst from earlier still rumbled in her head, and Matt's furious snarl when he'd pinned her against the wall followed behind it like an echo. She was surprised nobody had come to check on all the noise, but she knew Deborah was the only one who lived close enough to hear anything, and Deborah was on watch in the tollbooth tonight.

All her thoughts turned back to the same thing: _Get your pistol, walk back in here, and kill the feral before it kills anyone else_. She didn't move on it. Frank-- the co-dependent asshole-- needed Matt and the shelter needed Frank. They _needed_ the medical help. What they didn't need was a may-or-may-not-be-contagious, crippled-- _blind, remember that shit, Paige, remember that this thing is fucking blind_ \-- feral wandering around the goddamn shelter. Anywhere _near_ the goddamn shelter.

Karen chewed on the inside of her cheek, and tightened her hands over the back of her neck. She was being a fucking idiot just staying in this room.

Frank was pushing himself from side-to-side in the chair. He spoke up quietly. "Are you gonna tell Eric or not, Karen?" She didn't look at him, but she could clearly imagine the look that was on his face. Intense, questioning, severe.

"I don't know."

He hissed a sigh. "Look, I know you don't trust him. And that's... that's okay. I _get_ it, Karen. He's feral and ferals are _fucking assholes_. But not this guy." He paused, and she didn't look. "Hey. If you can't trust him, you can trust me. You know you can trust me, right?"

"I don't trust anyone," she said.

"Well, maybe you should start."

"I can't."

"Why?"

She couldn't come up with an answer, not one that he could understand, so she looked away, trying to find something else to focus on. All she had for an option was Matt, who was on his back on the cot, fiddling with something in his hands. A splintered pen. He could jump up and stab her with it, if he wanted to. He could also throw it aside and leap across the space and snap her neck because apparently, he was good at that shit.

Instead, he rolled over toward Frank and threw it at him. It bounced off of Frank's head and that look dropped off of his hardened face and turned it into a scowl as he whipped around with a hiss of frustration.

"The fuck, Matt? We're having a serious conversation."

"Yes."

"Of all the things you still remember, why does throwing shit at me have to be on the list?" Frank scowled and picked up the pen off the floor. "Douche." He threw it back, hard, and Matt caught it out of the air like it was always fated to land there, not even turning his head.

Karen blinked rapidly. What the _fuck._ "Jesus."

Frank scoffed. "You think that's impressive, you should see some of the crap he did back in the Kitchen. Parkouring little shit."

Matt tried to twirl the pen between his fingers, but he was using his left hand, and it was clumsy and trembling. He switched it to his right. "Parkouring, what is this?"

"It's your very favorite thing."

Matt huffed and rolled over to face him. "Really?"

"Oh, yeah. It's jumping around on buildings and shit. Backflipping off of flagpoles. Running around like a total fucking idiot trying to get his neck broken."

"Can I?" he sounded eager. All ferals sounded eager. Not a surprise.

Frank sighed. "No, not right now."

Matt frowned. He went back to twirling the pen, more fluid now that it was in the hand that worked.

Karen thought she remembered seeing him do it on occasion, at the office, when he was thinking or brooding or thought she wasn't looking. She pushed the thought away. Not important, not the same man, this is a monster in that man's body. A man that could hear heartbeats. A man-- an _animal_ \-- that had probably been living outside the gate for months, waiting for an opportunity to get inside, and Frank had gone out there and picked him up and brought him in like the idiot he was, and made it easy for him.

God. She needed a drink.

She needed to tell Eric.

"I won't say anything," she lied-- easily, so goddamn easily, it left her like fucking silk-- uncrossing her arms and using her elbows to push her up off of the wall. She didn't get any closer to the cot, closer to the feral, and he didn't react to her movement. "Foggy, I won't tell them."

He let out a small laugh. Genuine. It hurt. It hurt because she was lying. She ignored it like she ignored everything else. "Thank you, Karen. Just give me some time to figure something out, okay? It's... we'll figure something out."

"Something out," Matt echoed faintly from the cot.

"He repeats stuff," Frank said. "I think it's a good sign."

Karen didn't know. The aliens hadn't exactly brought back a pamphlet on their neurological virus when they'd come here. And she certainly wasn't a neurologist, either. "I'm... I gotta go. I gotta..." she didn't even know what she was going to do. Wait for Eric. He'd know what to do with this problem.

"Okay," Frank said, not moving from the chair. He was still keeping himself between her and Matt. Like he was more afraid of her striking out at Matt than he was of the feral striking out at her. Idiot. "Go, do whatever weird things you do alone at night. If you wanna come visit, you're welcome to. I think he'd like the company."

_He'd like to pin me to the wall and tear me to shreds, is what he'd like._

"Yeah," she said, faintly. Her stomach started up again. "I'll, um. I'll come back later."

\---

Karen was back in two hours.

She'd taken out her half-bottle of whiskey and uncapped it, then slowly recapped it and returned it to the shelf. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not for the rest of the week.

Because now that she pored through her memories, she remembered the feral, the quick one, the one that drowned another in the mud right in front of her, the one she'd tagged at least twice when it couldn't move fast enough. She'd hit him twice, but fired at him at least fifty times. It wasn't luck, she realized, that the feral had going for him: it was his senses. He'd heard the shots coming.

How the fuck could you kill something that could hear death coming a mile away?

Karen put her pistol at the small of her back, and decided she was going to find out how. She had to protect the others. She had to save Frank from his own goddamn stupidity. If she told Eric, he would be right at her side the entire time, but he would kill Frank for harboring a feral, and that wasn't in the best interest of the shelter.

_It's not in_ your _best interest_ , either, sang that soft alien voice in the back of her head. She smothered it with a heavy hand down her face and a harsh bite to her own tongue. _Shut up. Shut up. Shut up._

Karen made the decision with her hand on her door: Eric couldn't know. He _wouldn't_ know. She could kill the feral. She could protect Frank.

She was stepping out and moving quietly down the hall before she could stop herself. Karen slowed at Frank's room, listening. She couldn't hear anything, but the doors here were heavy, and did a decent job of muffling. If they'd been thinner, Matt's snarling from earlier might have caught someone's attention. Lucky prick.

There was a slight vibration under her feet; someone walking across Frank's room to open the door. She hadn't even knocked. Reflex made her want to grab her knife, knowing who could be coming at her. She fought it back, and then the door's lock clicked and Frank opened it.

"Uh." He leaned half out of the door and looked down both ends of the hall. Empty. "He heard you coming. Get in."

She stepped inside. He had the electric lamp going in the corner-- it was getting dark out-- and Matt was on the cot, one pant leg pushed up. His eyes flicked around as he tilted his head in her direction. It wasn't that same total-body focus she'd received earlier. He didn't seem too worried that she was in the room with him. Or he did, and wasn't showing it.

"Lock the door, Karen?" Frank asked, stepping back toward the cot. "Sorry, uh, just a second. Matt fucked up his dressing."

Karen locked the door as asked, but didn't move further inside. She watched as Frank knelt down next to the cot, pulling a roll of gauze out of the little bag he had sitting on the floor. First aid kit. "He got hurt?" Good.

"Uh, yeah. A few days ago? An arrow. It was, um, getting infected."

"Jack?" Good boy. Too bad he hadn't aimed three feet higher and planted it in the little fucker's throat. "Jack's--"

Frank fired a glare at her, deadly warning on his face. _What?_   Karen fell quiet and thought about it. Right, he probably didn't want Matt to know the person who'd shot him was living just on the other side of the compound. She realized that she didn't want him to know, either, because Jack would be on Matt's shit-list, even though everyone should be on Matt's shit-list, but Matt would definitely be trying to get him back for the injury. Ferals were vindictive little bastards.

Frank turned back to the cot slowly, grabbing a roll of tape in his other hand. "Okay, dude, stay still. And Jesus, don't mess with this one this time."

Matt grumbled.

"You need to speak clearly," Frank said, not looking up, like a parent reminding their child for the hundredth time to do the same thing.

Karen watched silently as they talked back and forth to each other, one confident, the other slow and hesitant. She was watching them attempt to put Matt's head back together, she realized, and Frank was the one with the fucking glue. They were both going to fumble and fuck it up. You couldn't put something back together if it no longer existed.

"Foggy, the w-- the wo-- the word."

"What word?"

"Ngh. Not hurts."

"It's not 'hurts'? Then what is it?"

"Foggy, help."

"I'm trying. You need to tell me more."

Matt huffed, rolling his head back on his shoulders. His face tightened in pain as Frank worked. She tried not to drink in the image. "Not a lot. Hurts. Foggy."

"It hurts, just not bad?"

"Hn. Yes."

"Itchy?"

"Yes! Yes. Itchy." A grin flashed across his face, disrupting the hard edge of pain. It looked strange. "Itchy," he repeated, like he was committing it to memory. She knew he'd forget it. That part of his brain was long-fucking-dead.

"I know the gauze is itchy, but you gotta keep it on. It'll get infected. You'll lose your leg."

"Lose your leg?"

"Yeah. I'll have to chop it off with a knife. It'll be disgusting."

Karen took a short step closer. Frank was taping the gauze down, fingers as deft and practiced as they always were. The wound was somewhere near Matt's knee, which she knew was a really bad place. He probably opened it up every time he moved. Shit, maybe it would go septic and kill him. Wouldn't _that_ be convenient.  Slow, but convenient.

"There! All done. Don't fuck around with this one, seriously. I don't have a lot of this stuff left." Frank got back to his feet, giving her a short smile that she didn't respond to before moving to his wobbly table. "Always falling apart on me, Murdock, I never know what to do with the pieces."

"Murdock, what is this?"

Frank went still and sighed. A frown crossed his face as he slowly put his things away. "It's your last name, man."

Matt frowned, too. "Foggy, okay." His voice was quiet. Shame? Did he even know what a last name was?

Then, of course, Frank-- because he was _Foggy_ \-- broke apart the ridiculous emotion that was hovering in the air around them by yanking a granola bar from his bag. Karen hadn't felt it. She was, proudly, immune. "Hungry, Matty?"

"Yes."

"Here. Remember how to open it?"

"Yes," Matt said, catching the offering out of the air as it was tossed to him-- that was never going to stop looking weird, hopefully she wouldn't have to see it for much longer-- and ripped it open. He paused for a moment, eyes darting back and forth, then leaned down and carefully broke the granola bar into three pieces, holding one of them out. "Foggy."

"Thanks, dude," the other man said, accepting it and plopping down on the computer chair. He popped it in his mouth, clearly without even thinking about it, smiling and leaning heavily on the backrest as he chewed. What an idiot.

"Kar-Karen," Matt mumbled from the cot, the name awkward in his mouth. It was the first time she'd heard him say it. She did not want to hear it again. He held out the third piece to her with his trembling hand.

She jolted and stepped back. " _Fuck_ no." The words burned as she spat them out.

Matt's arm dropped and he fell quiet, eyes flicking slowly around the area of the floor. He stuffed his piece into his mouth and chewed while turning the one he'd offered to her over and over in his hands.

"That's okay, Matty, she's probably not hungry." Frank still shot her a glare over his shoulder. It was equally sad and frightening, but it only lasted a merciful half a second before he turned back to Matt. "You eat it."

Karen's frown returned. She wasn't touching _anything_ that had been handled by him. That should have been obvious. It shouldn't have even happened in the first place.  The tenseness that Frank had taken out of the air came right back again, and this time, she felt it.

"Why'd you come here, Paige?" Frank asked, the geniality in his tone gone, like it had never been there in the first place. His trust in her was slipping. She could hear it. He'd made the same mistake with her that he'd made with Matt: he still saw her as Karen, and Karen no longer existed.

"I still want to talk to you."

"Yeah? About what?"

"Eric invited me down to Brooklyn. Next week."

"So?"

"It's permanent."

Matt put the third piece of the granola bar in his mouth and chewed silently. Frank tapped his foot on the floor, thinking. After a minute, he impatiently asked, "Well? Are you going with him, or not?"

"...I don't know."

"Come to me for advice?"

"No."

"Right. You made your choice, so why are you really here?"

She feigned innocence. "You said to visit."

"Well, here we are. Visit."

Karen shifted on her feet. He was going to see through it. The gun was heavy at her back. How many shots could she squeeze off, if she drew it fast enough? Could she hit the feral before Frank came in between them? She talked slowly. Not as slowly as the Matt, at least. "So... how are you feeling?"

Matt started fiddling with the granola bar wrapper, folding it over itself, running his thumbs along the edges. He didn't talk, and his eyes didn't come up from the floor. Not that it'd make a difference.

"Who, me?" Frank tilted his head in her direction, then to Matt's. "Or him?"

Wasn't that obvious? "You," she answered, quickly.

"I'm good." Frank leaned back in the computer chair. His expression was a mystery. "Enjoying the weather. Trying to figure out what the hell's wrong with my ex-secretary. Teaching my best friend how to talk again. You know, the usual."

"There's nothing wrong with me," she said, and immediately flinched inwardly at her own words. Yeah, there was something wrong with her, but there was something wrong with _everyone_. She wished, for a too-long second, that Frank hadn't ever shown up at her doorstep. A thought rippled through her head: she wished he'd died out there instead of coming here. He'd brought trouble with him, and now she was going to have to clean up both of their mistakes.

Frank laughed. It sounded all wrong. "Yeah, okay."

Matt sighed and laid himself down on his stomach on the cot, wincing as he jostled his leg. He kept messing with the wrapper, face tilted toward the floor. "Karen, sorry," he said, hesitant, nothing more than a soft mumble.

She didn't like it when he talked to her. She didn't respond. It was like every monster that had ever lived under her bed or in her closet had come into the light, smiling and apologizing, while hiding their claws behind their backs.

"Don't say sorry, Matt," Frank said, propping his feet up on the cot. "Not your fault."

"Mm." Matt frowned at the floor. He rolled onto his side, facing the wall, his back to them. "Foggy, okay." Barely audible.

Karen pushed her hands up her face. She was aflame with nerves being ten feet away from a feral and churning with that murky mix of stinging emotion from Frank's voice. Her muscles were stiff, primed for Matt to leap up from the bed, cross the space, and fling her into the wall with that awful snarl again.

"Paige," Frank started, leaning back in the chair. "You okay?" All he had on his face was irritation and anger. He was lying just as much as she was.

"I'm fine," she answered, rubbing her face again. "Thinking."

"That's all I've been doing since I saw him. Good to know he still makes everything so goddamn complicated even after the world's ended."

Matt rolled his head in Frank's direction. "Complicated, what is this?"

"It means you're a pain in my ass."

A frowned dropped hard onto Matt's face, and he rolled over again, hurt. She felt that little aftershock of thrill go through her body. A feral, suffering. This fucking animal wasn't Matt. It was only in Matt's body. Matt had been dead for a very long time.

"Oh, come on," Frank said, leaning forward to nudge him on the shoulder. "I didn't mean it like that. God." Matt didn't answer. Frank grunted and leaned back in the chair again. _"Matt."_

That tone again. Hard, serious. She saw Matt flinch and start to curl up tighter before rolling back over again, obedient. _How?_   His eyes were slowly tracking around the area of the table, face half-hidden in a blanket. "Foggy. Sorry."

Karen studied him closely. That receptiveness, that eager leap to attention, that yearning to please him. Like a dog. Really, what were ferals, other than dogs in packs fighting over prey?

Except that this dog understood speech even if he couldn't say anything worthwhile himself. He had those strange, intense senses that could lead him to whatever Frank asked him to find-- _he could find anything, Karen_ , Frank had said. He could flip a person on their back and disarm them in fucking seconds. He had been the goddamned  _Daredevil_ and yet here he was, crippled by the virus, left intact just enough to obediently carry out whatever Frank asked him to do.

This wasn't a guard dog. This wasn't just a feral. This was a fucking loaded weapon with the safety off, and Frank's finger was on the goddamned trigger.

"What-- why are _you_ the one apologizing?" Frank asked, and she allowed his voice to tug her from her thoughts.

Matt took a while to answer. "...Don't know." Of course he didn't.

Frank lifted his arms in exasperation. "If you don't know something, Matty, don't do it. _Ask me_. You know you can ask me." He pulled himself closer to the cot with his feet, and ruffled Matt's hair. "I'm not mad. I'm trying to figure out what to do. Okay?"

"...'Kay." The look of devastation broke right off of Matt's face as he smiled at being touched, head lifting upward-- leaning into Frank's hand in an attempt to get more. Karen knew it, because she did the exact opposite. The sight made her shiver again.

Karen didn't like watching them. Karen couldn't stop watching them.

Matt shoved himself up on his arms, still smiling, and, just like earlier, pushed his forehead against Frank's.

She felt her stomach roll when she realized that it was some kind of hug, a show of affection, because he probably didn't remember _how_ to hug, but he still wanted to. Distressingly, Frank was enjoying it just as much as Matt was. He grinned and laughed, and he looked so fucking young, so fucking alive. A whip-fast reflex of jealousy swept through her, but she doused it with disgust, and felt better for it.

Karen thought about drawing the gun and killing them both. Remembered that Frank was the only medical professional they had. Remembered Matt's eager obedience for that same man. Karen stopped herself. There were more important things here. There was a far bigger picture yet to be completed.

She didn't even excuse herself. She turned to the door, opened it, and left. Matt tilted his head, watching her go-- as much as he could watch anything. Frank didn't say a word. Karen slammed the door shut behind her.

_Next time, asshole._

\---

Eric caught her in the hallway as she walked back to her room, forcing himself immediately into her space and pressing her against the wall. His hands ran rough up her arms, then back down, settling on her hips. "Paige," he purred, against her throat. His long hair tickled her ear.

"Eric," she responded. It really wasn't the best time. Her own voice screamed in her head: _Tell him, tell him, tell him_. She didn't tell him. "Welcome back. How are you?"

"Mmm. Queens smells like shit," he murmured into her skin, pulling away. "I missed you." No, he didn't. He missed her body. He did not miss Paige at all. She still didn't stop him from grabbing her wrist and yanking her down the hall with him. "I got you something."

Her stomach rolled over, and her blood felt colder, but her face didn't so much as twitch. _Another one?_  She did not like it when he brought her _anything_. "Oh, yeah?" She let out a breath as he pinned her to the wall again-- instinct tried to dictate her movements for her, tried to get her to buck and get away, but nothing happened-- and ran his lips up her neck.

Eric trailed clumsily along to her ear, whispering. "I killed the alpha."

Frank's voice breathed in her head as if he were in her other ear, _He just fucking wiped out the alpha._

Her face did not move and her voice did not break. "Oh? How?"

"I stabbed it in the head. Like a _kebab_." The final syllable came out of his mouth with a dull popping noise. She shuddered gently. He felt it, and grinned that wild grin of his.

_He put a piece of power line through its head._

It took her a few seconds to realize that she believed Frank's-- _Foggy's_ \-- words more than she believed the words of the man in front of her. She swallowed reflexively and played it off as excitement, rerouting what she was actually feeling (or thought she was feeling) into what she thought Eric wanted her to feel.

She ran her fingers up his arms, to his neck. She wished she could shove him away. "How brave," she lied, because lying was easy, because her face never fucking moved so the truth could never be seen. "Only took you four months to stop it."

"Well, you know animals." He nipped at her throat. "They like to hide."

She let out a low noise at the biting-- she didn't like it, it reminded her too much of-- of things she didn't like to bring back into her head. Karen would never tell him so. "You wouldn't come all this way just to tell me that."

"No. I found something else." He tugged at her shirt and led her further down the hall. Around the corner, past the kitchen, past the infirmary. Eric enjoyed his solitude, for more than one reason, and kept a room to himself in a loft above the other garage. Quiet, with a decent view of the courtyard.

_I found something better,_ she thought to herself, and kept it deep in her head, a secret, a key to let her out of this cage, a gun she could finally fire to free herself from this tightly-turning circle she had wound herself into.

She climbed the stairs and stepped inside. It was dark, musty. The smell of something dead and the smell of something chemical rose in her face. She swallowed her discomfort.

Eric clicked on the light-- one of the few working switches in the building, one of the few non-essential things drawing power from the generator-- and brought her to his rumpled bed, two mismatched mattresses laying unevenly on top of each other.

"Here," he breathed, leaving her on the stained comforter, bringing over a pistol. It looked heavy and awkward.

"You have a gun already," she said.

"No, no." He pulled back the slide. It wasn't loaded with bullets. She saw something plastic instead, opaque white and orange.

"Tranquilizer gun." Karen took the weapon in her hands and turned it over. She knew what he was going to use it for. She knew before he even opened his mouth. She knew before she'd even known it was a tranquilizer gun. "You're going to try to catch one."

Eric sat down and pressed himself against her, leaning in against her ear. "I'm _going to catch one_ ," he corrected. "I'm going to teach them to never fucking touch you again, Paige." He trailed his fingertips underneath her jaw, then ran his thumb along the scar on her cheek, down to her ear, curling his fingers around the ruined cartilage.

She felt his possessiveness and wanted to bolt. She didn't belong to anyone, she didn't need _saving_ by anyone, and she sure as hell didn't need someone to get revenge _for_ her. She could do it just fine herself.

Karen set the gun aside. "Let me catch it."

He sighed against her skin, excited. "Oh, yes. You can absolutely do it. I would love that."

Disgust crept up her throat as he mouthed at her neck. She wanted to push him away, but her emotions faltered halfway out of her head, as they always did, and instead she let him pull her down to the bed.

"Eric," she started, trying to bring out the words she wanted to say, feeling them float murky in the back of her head, and she was reminded of someone else, but then Eric's lips fell against hers and he was pressing her to the covers, and she allowed it, she allowed him to touch her, and she allowed the thought to fade from her mind like smoke over water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Do just what I tell you..._  
>  _And no one will get hurt._  
>  Frou Frou


	9. no-one's gonna love you

As Karen slammed the door, Foggy walked up and locked it behind her, rubbing his face and sighing. Damn, he'd known it wasn't going to go well between her and Matt, and he'd never hoped she would break down into tears and rush over and give the bastard a hug or anything, but Jesus, he had never known her to be cruel for the sake of cruelty--

No, wait, he had. Of course he had. She was cruel to _ferals._

And that's what Matt was, from no choice of his own. But he was also _Matt_. She just couldn't see him, she couldn't see who he was _still_ , past the tremor and his broken voice and his shattered thoughts. It wasn't like Karen to skip off the surface of what she saw and continue on her path like the shit underneath didn't matter.

Then his brain reminded him: she wasn't Karen. She was Paige, now.

Foggy sat back down in the computer chair and buried his face in his hands. Matt was silent but awake, curled up on the cot, folding up the wrapper of the granola bar and then unfolding it, over and over again. Foggy could call it moping, but this was so far from The Mope that it hurt to look at.

"I'm sorry, Matty," Foggy said between his fingers.

He heard Matt roll over on the blankets. "Foggy, why?"

"I shouldn't have let her in here. I shouldn't have let her treat you like that." He pushed his fingers into his eyes to get the itchy burning feeling of impending tears out of them. Matt wouldn't be able to notice them as long as he didn't let them put a hitch in his voice. "Sorry, buddy."

"Okay," was Matt's quiet reply.

Foggy heard him start messing with the wrapper again and dropped his hands. Matt was on his back, running his fingertips along the corners and edges he kept creating with the different folds. His hair was in his face but he didn't notice. All Foggy really saw was the frown on his lips, so tiny but so goddamned heavy. It was the same look he'd gotten when he'd been told everyone else at the shelter would be afraid of him, and that he wasn't safe around them, and he hadn't fucking understood why.

Foggy spoke quietly. "...You know you don't deserve that, right, Matt?"

The silence he got instead of a response told him: no, Matt didn't know. He didn't realize that he wasn't something detestable, he wasn't something to be shoved away and feared and targeted. All he really knew was what he'd experienced so far, and it was that, with the exception of Foggy, every other person at the shelter had tried to kill him. Some had actually brought him injury-- Karen included.

What was that like, Foggy wondered, following an instinct to protect, only to have the one you'd saved turn right around and put an arrow in you for it?

He let out a shaky breath and pulled himself to the edge of the bed. Frowning, he brushed Matt's hand before gently taking the wrapper and unfolding it. "You don't deserve to be treated like that, buddy. I need you to know that. Do you understand?"

Matt rolled over until he was facing him, half-curled on his side, fingers tapping aimlessly over the blankets now that there was nothing to distract them. "Foggy... yes." He did not sound too sure about it. His palm found a loose thread and he started twisting it between his thumb and forefinger.

"I don't want Karen back in here, okay? I don't know what she'll try to do."

That statement hit him a little harder, judging by the way his expression twisted under the uneven curtain of his hair. "...Yes. Foggy, okay." He pulled his arms up against himself, rubbing his chest, and pushed his face in Foggy's direction like he could see what he was doing.

Foggy straightened the wrapper out and started folding it back together into a different pattern, pushing the creases together tightly between his fingernails. "It'll be okay, Matty. I'll figure something out." He sighed. "You ever think about living in Boston?"

"Boston, what is this?"

"It's a city. North of here. It isn't New York, but... maybe it'll be nicer there. Maybe the rivers won't stink so much. Might be less mud." He placed a final fold and turned the wrapper over in his palm. A tiny little airplane. "What do you think of a place like that?"

Matt pushed half his face into the blanket beneath him. "Foggy, can I? Sta... um, stay?"

"Stay here?"

"...Foggy... no."

"With me?"

"...Yes." His voice was so small, like he feared the answer.

"Yes, Matty. Of course. That's why I want to go there. Nothing's gonna take you away from me. And I'm never gonna leave you. Understand?" Foggy guided the folded wrapper back into Matt's hands.

"Foggy, yes," he said, relief touching every syllable, as he sat up and turned the wrapper over and over, trying to discern what it was imitating. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me for that. Please don't ever thank me for that." You thanked people when you received a gift, and this was no gift. There was no altruism to be found here. "...What do you think that shape is, buddy?"

"Hm." Matt turned it over again. "Don'know."

"Let me?" He brushed his finger along the back of Matt's hand and smiled as he received it back. "Watch it fly, Matty."

Foggy threw it once he saw Matt blink slowly and lean forward, focusing, but it glided only a few inches before tilting down and spinning straight to the floor. He started to laugh to himself, but Matt echoed him, and instead they ended up sharing it. "Okay, that wasn't very good flying, was it?" He picked it up again.

"Foggy, I want." Matt reached out for it and when he got it back, he started fiddling with the little wings, straightening out the nose again, smoothing his thumb over the top to even it all out. He tilted his head and threw it with a gentle, graceful ease, and it went another foot and a half before knocking into the table and falling to the floor.

"Nice. Man, who taught you to make paper airplanes?"

"Airplanes, what is this?"

Foggy laughed again, and it was stronger. "That's what you just threw across the room. How'd you know how to make it fly better?" He got up and sat on the cot.

Matt considered his answer as he shifted to share the space. "Sound. Sounds, mm, difference?"

"Different," Foggy corrected gently.

"Different. Sounds different."

He'd heard the air, Foggy thought, moving over the fragile aluminum wings. It seemed like it'd be such a tiny sound, too small for even Matt to detect, but still he had found it and listened and smoothed out the awkward edges and tried again. Foggy smiled to himself and stretched out on the cot as Matt climbed down haltingly to pick the plane back up.

"Show me how to do it sometime," Foggy said as his friend came back and sat back down, squeezing himself into the tiny space left next to him. He could tell Matt's leg was killing him, but he didn't seem to take notice.

"Me? Show?"

"I can't do all the work. There's things you know that I don't."

"Really?"

His smile faltered but he kept it there, even if Matt would never be able to see it. "Yeah, man. You're a total smartass. You just don't know it yet."

Matt tilted his head toward him, smiling in a cautious, soft way. "Okay."

Foggy bundled his pillow up more comfortably under his head as the electric lamp flickered on the table. "Hey, you wanna hear about a guy named Mad Max?"

\---

A vibration against his back woke Foggy up from a deep and empty dream, and he opened his eyes. Discolored moonlight was coming in through his window and the entire image was cut down the middle by a fold of blanket. He grumbled and pushed his forehead against his arm, but then the vibration started up again and he shifted.

"...Matt?"

They'd fallen asleep in an uncoordinated pile, Foggy on his stomach and Matt awkwardly bundled on top of him like a goddamn cat or something, because there wasn't space for him to stretch out alongside, and for some reason he'd just been _all about_ using the space between Foggy's shoulders as a pillow.

There was drool on Foggy's shirt, but Matt wasn't asleep. He was half off of him, body stiff and still, and he was growling. The vibration was coming from that untamed machine, idling against Foggy's back.

"Matt."

No answer. Fuck.

Foggy grunted and rolled himself over, tangled up in the blankets. He tried to shove them off to move quicker, but he couldn't tell what the fuck was what and gave that up in order to reach out and try to get to his friend. "Hey, buddy, hey. What is it?"

Matt picked himself up a little more as Foggy moved underneath him. His head was twitching all over as he listened to something, his body rigid with absolute focus, his hair in disarray, shoulders stiff and half-bowed. The rattling in his chest died down, then rose up again as he took a deeper breath.

Foggy tried to fight down his panic. Not another plateau. Jesus, anything but that. He'd thought the virus had gone from plateau to valley and Matt was just stuck permanently rolling around in the shadows below, not getting ready to go down deeper. Christ, no. He didn't have his sedatives and he knew he would not be able to wrestle his friend into submission.

Karen couldn't be right. She just fucking _couldn't._

"Hey. Matt." Foggy brushed a hand along the trembling arm, trying to get his attention, to break him out of it like he'd done before. "Shh, shh, it's okay."

A huff blew from Matt's nose as he brought his other hand around shakily. His fingernails, chewed down to bluntness, dug weakly into the skin on the back of Foggy's hand. That was good. Matt never wanted contact when there was a plateau, so that was good. Right?

Matt took another breath, deep and slow and shivery. The growl got louder. Rattling into Foggy's skin, bones, and brain.

"Jesus. _Matt._ " Foggy got an elbow under himself and levered his body upright, breathing carefully-- he couldn't panic. He would make it worse. Moving his hand up from Matt's arm, he trailed it to the back of his neck, feeling the muscles twisted hard and tight beneath his skin. "Matty."

Matt tilted his head in Foggy's direction, blinking.

"Hey. Jesus. There you are. You okay?"

"Mm?"

Even with just that low, vague mumble, Foggy felt infinitely better. Comprehension. Matt had comprehended that he was being spoken to, and wasn't trying to get away from Foggy's touch. In fact, he was leaning into it like he always did, swallowing as his growl started to quiet down.

"...Did you hear something, Matty?"

"Hear," he repeated, the muscles in his neck relaxing as he reeled his focus back in. How fucking far could he listen while inside the shelter? "Hear them."

"What did you hear?"

Matt huffed, the noise of it overtaking the fading rumble, and when the noise died, the rumble was gone. Now it looked like he was fighting back a yawn. Whatever it was, he couldn't hear it anymore. "Foggy. Don'know."

"Can you try to describe it? What did it sound like?"

The yawn erupted. "...Don'know." He flopped over on the bed.

Ferals, Foggy assumed. Outside the shelter and outside the fence, in the woods. Snarling or fighting, waking Matt up with their damned noise so that he became the scariest alarm clock to ever exist against Foggy's goddamn back.

The relief that Matt hadn't stepped back up on a plateau or tumbled down into a valley made him relax all over, the knowledge a drug. The truth of it sat in his hands already: there was no plateau, and there was no valley. His friend was Matt, and his friend was the animal, both sides blurred and smeared together into one trembling silhouette in this dirty moonlight. There was no separation anymore. An unbounded blessing and an infinite damnation.

Foggy rubbed his face and pushed his hair back. "Is it gone, now?"

"...Yes."

"Good, then enjoy the silence and go back to sleep, buddy."

Matt stretched out in the space left empty on the cot by Foggy sitting upright, tugging at the softest blanket to try to get it over himself. Greedy bastard. "Silence, what is this?"

Foggy shifted to get the rest of the blanket out from under him. "It means you can't hear anything."

He could see Matt's frown of confusion in the dirty moonlight, saw his eyes flick around as he tried to dredge up the words to respond with. "Hear, um, a lot. Foggy." Blanket claimed, he bundled it up around himself, face hidden, but Foggy could tell he was smiling. Probably shit-eating. He had the best blanket on the bed.

But yep, that was a stupid answer to give to a man like the one next to him. "Yeah, yeah. You hear everything. I know." Foggy tried stretching out his legs but there was no room, so he just flopped them over on top of Matt's stomach.

Matt didn't care. "Hear everything," he repeated, but not from lack of understanding, not this time. "Hear everything."

"I _know_. Don't drool on my fucking feet, please," Foggy grunted, getting the pillow back under his head. Worst sleeping arrangement ever. He didn't care. "Go back to sleep, Matty, okay?"

\---

When Foggy woke up in the morning, they were back in the same goddamn position as before, except Matt was drooling into the back of his neck this time. And _snoring_. Like a fucking chainsaw. _In his ear._

It was the best night's sleep that Foggy had gotten in three months.

"Get up, dude," Foggy grunted, elbowing him gently. "Please?"

Matt snorted and grumbled, and then lifted himself up-- he really didn't weigh that much, Foggy could barely tell the difference-- and made a gross sound as he sucked at all the drool that had accumulated on his lips. "...Whuh?"

"God, you sleep like a fucking rock." Unless he heard something, apparently. Foggy hid his jealousy. "Get off'a me, man."

There was another weird rumbling noise, and Matt climbed off of the cot, plopping his happy ass right to the floor with a low grunt. He said _something_ , but Foggy couldn't decipher it. It sounded like he'd pulled up a random Wikipedia article about bugs and taken out all the fucking vowels.

Foggy rolled over onto his back, wincing, then pushed himself up with a groan. They were gonna have to work out a different sleeping arrangement. How was he supposed to hide this shit from everyone if he was nursing a backache when he had to see them? "What did you just _say_ , dude?"

"Foggy," Matt started, stopped, yawned, then started again, "...Foggy, sleep?"

"You want to go back to sleep?"

"Yes."

"Go ahead, man." Christ, he slept a lot. And so _easily_. Foggy climbed off of the cot, feeling the bubble wrap in his spine again. Matt took his place in half a second, pulling all the blankets down over himself. "How often are you tired, buddy?"

His reply was muffled but there. "Nnngh. Foggy, a lot."

"A lot?" Foggy's brain shifted gear and went smoothly up into doctor mode. Well, nurse mode. Well, barely-trained assistant mode. "Are you sick?"

"Sick?" Matt echoed, pulling at the blankets until he could get his face out into the open. "Yes."

"You are?" Fuck. He hadn't noticed a fever or anything. "What's wrong?"

Another grunt. Confusion? Matt wiggled again and stuck out his left arm for Foggy to see, the one with the permanent tremble.

"Oh, that... that doesn't count." Did it? Was the virus causing him to be so goddamn exhausted all the time? Had it been a symptom before he'd gone totally brainfucked, and he'd just fucking _ignored it_ because of his ridiculous self-flagellation Catholic bullshit? God, that was even more depressing. "You've always had that, man."

"Mmph." Matt pulled all his limbs back inside the mess of blankets-- he even used the woolen one, but he never let it touch his skin-- and fell quiet.

Foggy pushed a hand down his face and went to use the bathroom. He took a couple of the Tylenol that he'd snatched for Matt and came back out. The mess on the cot hadn't moved. He sat in the computer chair with a sigh, pushing it back and forth with his feet, crossing his arms.

Matt rolled over, toward him, or at least that's what it looked like-- he was still buried in blankets, just like what he'd done in the apartment. "Foggy, okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just trying to figure out what to... what to do with you, man."

"Me?"

He was having a conversation with a pile of blankets. This felt familiar. "Everyone's gonna get suspicious if I stay in here all the time. I'm supposed to be out there, helping everyone. My sick excuse isn't gonna hold out another day."

"Excuse, what is this?"

"An excuse is... it's something I tell them so I can get away with this shit."

Matt yanked the blankets off of his head like he'd suddenly gotten claustrophobic. He huffed his hair out of his face. "Lie?"

"Are you telling me to lie, or are you asking if I'm lying to them?"

"Mm."

"Of course I'm lying to them, Matt. I can't tell them you're here. _None_ of them can know you're here." It was bad enough that Karen knew. And Jesus, Karen. There was no way he would ever be able to leave her alone with Matt. He couldn't tell what the fuck she was thinking, ever, so he had to default to the actual facts he knew about her, and those facts told him that she would kill any feral she saw at the first opportunity.

God. Maybe he wasn't supposed to leave him alone in here.

He just wished he had another option that didn't resort to sticking Matt back out in the elements, alone. Nope, not a possibility.

Foggy pushed his hands roughly over his hair and down to his neck, tightening his hairtie before squeezing the muscles at the back of his skull. "I gotta go out today, Matty. You're gonna have to stay in here. They'll find you. Can you stay here, buddy?"

"Don't want."

"I know you don't want. Don't want _to_." It was way too easy mimic Matt's slow, stumbling speech back at him. It felt mocking, but he knew it more for him to hear it than it hurt Matt, because to Matt, it wasn't anything but more words to try to decipher. "I gotta go, though. I'm not risking them coming here and finding you."

Matt picked himself up off of the cot and sat cross-legged, wincing as his movements pulled at his knee. The wool blanket landed on his arm; he shivered and pushed it off.

"Foggy, how?"

"How what?"

He started rolling his eyes around. Foggy waited, but he knew he couldn't wait long. Eventually Matt just huffed and reached out, taking Foggy's hand clumsily, tapping his fingers over the watch face. "Foggy, how?"

"Uh... I don't get it, Matt. Can you tell me more?"

Matt made that low chuffing noise. Frustration. "P-pulse," he mumbled, then shook his head once, no, that wasn't what he wanted. "Slow?" No, that wasn't it either. He dropped Foggy's hand and scrubbed his palms roughly over his face and through his hair, losing patience with himself.

"Shh, it's okay, I'll help you figure it out." Foggy looked down at his watch, frowning. He felt his gut churning at how difficult it was, at how Matt had to search, scattered and desperate, for every word he tried to say. "Are you asking the time? Or..." he hummed. "Oh, maybe... you want to know how long I'll be gone?"

"Yes! Yes." Matt dropped his hands from his face. Foggy felt himself smiling. Another fragment of memory jostled. "Yes. Foggy, how long?"

"Oh, um... let's say... four hours? I'll be back for lunch."

"Hours, what is this?"

"...An hour is sixty minutes."

"Minutes, what is this?"

"...Sixty seconds."

"Seconds, what is this?"

"It's a very short amount of time, a second." Foggy thought a moment, then took off his watch and guided it gently into Matt's hands. "Every time my watch ticks, that's a second." Could he even fucking count? "Sixty of them. You know what sixty is?"

Matt hummed, turning the watch over in his hands. "Foggy, help."

"Help you with what, buddy?" He took a breath-- patience. God, he really needed to fucking get moving. Someone would probably die while he was sitting here trying to teach Matt to fucking count to sixty.

"No." Matt jerked his head in that harsh shake. "Them."

"Oh." _Oh._ "Yeah, I'm gonna do that." Foggy felt the smile spread across his face. Maybe this would be easier than he thought. Matt was a smart guy. Intuitive. That much hadn't changed about him, Foggy realized with glee. "I'll be back. Four hours. I'll bring food. Okay?"

"Foggy, yes."

"Atta boy." He stood up. "Don't leave the room, okay?"

"Foggy, won't."

"Okay. I'll be back, buddy."

He left Matt sitting on the cot, messing around with the watch, and locked the door behind him.

\---

"You look a lot better today, Frank."

"Thanks. Beauty sleep, and all that."

Foggy was checking Jack's stitches, leaning down closely to make sure none of them were coming out or causing too much swelling. Despite how uneven his work had been that day, they were in decent condition.

"Eric's back. He thinks he found another military cache."

"Oh, yeah?" He feigned his interest. His mind was far too concerned about all of the dumb things that could happen to Matt while Foggy was out here poking at peoples' wounds. What if he climbed out the window? What if he turned on the shower and drowned? _What if Karen or Eric broke in and shot him in the goddamned face?_

Jack didn't notice how distracted he was. "Yeah. On a boat."

"Where the fuck did he find a boat?"

"I don't know. I barely heard him. He was talking to Paige about it. At breakfast. Which you missed, by the way."

_Fuck_ , right, breakfast. Matt was probably trying to eat a pillow again by now. God, he was an idiot.

"Oh. Yeah. Sorry. I slept in." Foggy let out a breath and tried to push the worry out of his head along with it, carefully taping down a fresh piece of gauze. "There. Another few days, I'll pull them out. You can probably start with light activity now." He gathered up the dirtied stuff and moved to toss it in the trash to be burned later. " _Light_ , Jack." The stupid kid was probably going to go out hunting or scavenging the second he walked out the infirmary door.

"...Yeah, yeah." Jack hopped down from the table, yanking his sweater on. It was one of those hand-knit things with a weird design that reminded Foggy of the sort of stuff he'd get from his grandparents on Christmas. They'd forced one on Matt once. Good times. "Thanks, Frank."

"No problem." Foggy went to check his watch for the fiftieth time that day before realizing he wasn't wearing it anymore, and looked up at the one on the wall. "Medical run soon?"

"Yeah, tomorrow."

"Where are you gonna be looking?"

"Up north, I think. Need anything in particular?"

Foggy chewed on his tongue. "The usual. Whatever drugs you can find." He started digging through the cupboards, not really looking for anything, just wanting a cover because he knew how fucking godawful his poker face was, thanks to Karen. "Oh, hey... I'm looking for something kinda... weird."

"What's that?" Jack sounded like he was muffling a laugh. Probably thought Foggy was angling for a dildo or something.

Not even close. "A, uh... a dog whistle?"

" _Dog whistle?_   The hell do you need that for?"

_Okay, dude, continue with the lying, he might be falling for it._ "It's kinda... it's a really stupid reason, Jack, you sure you want to hear it?" Foggy kept his face buried in the cupboard, but heard the shift of metal as Jack sat back down on the table.

The kid's voice sounded soft and eager. "Of course. It can't get any weirder than some of the stuff Eric wants, that's for damned sure."

He put that snippet of information about Eric in the back of his head for later thought and continued. "I kind of... I like to keep one for good luck. I had a dog once." Sort of. "I had a whistle with me when you guys found me in the Park, but I guess I lost it." Purposely, in the river. _Shut up, brain_. "Can you keep an eye out for one for me?"

"Sure, man." Jack sounded... well, like Jack. Foggy had been around so many people that didn't know how emotions worked that he was starting to wonder if he did, too.

"I'll look for one."

Foggy blew out a breath and eventually surfaced from the cupboard. "Thanks, bro." God, he sucked at lying. He always had. Living with _only Matt_ for two years had beaten a permanent truthfulness in him, because lying around Matt was impossible. He'd just stopped doing it, and now he was out of practice.

"Thanks for keeping me in one piece," Jack returned, giving him a smile. "Coming to lunch, Frank?"

"Hm? Nah. I gotta..." Jesus, why hadn't he thought of his 'lunch excuse' earlier, _shit_ , how had he landed a hole-in-one on the fucking dog whistle but couldn't come up with anything about fucking _lunch?_   "...I was thinking about, uh, napping."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "Napping?"

"Napping."

"I mean, I guess, if you wanna be that boring."

Foggy huffed a laugh. It sounded like Matt's. He choked it down, like that would be his tell, like all of a sudden Jack would leap up and yell _'You're hiding a feral in here, I can tell from that laugh!'_

"Yeah, well, I'm a pretty boring guy. Didn't figure that out after three months, huh?"

Jack laughed. _Success. Mission status: viable._ "All right, Frank. You go and enjoy your... beauty sleep."

"I'll try."

\---

Foggy didn't see Karen on his way to the kitchen, and he didn't see her on the way back, either. It was good, because he didn't really want to interact with her, and he was fairly sure that she didn't want to interact with him. He grit his teeth as he rounded the corner on the last hallway to his room, images blooming in his head of her breaking in and--

Well, she could certainly _try_ to kill Matt. She probably wouldn't get very far.

The image of his friend, from ages ago, panting and wild in a dusty alleyway over a twisted body came together in Foggy's head. One of those things that he knew he wouldn't be able to scrub out of his memory. A permanent image. Except now, his brain liked to photoshop other things in-- like Karen's body bent unnaturally at Matt's feet instead of that random feral he'd killed.

Foggy shook his head-- it never helped to get the pictures out-- and stuck his key in the doorknob, carefully juggling the paper bowl of Ramen noodles and the plastic grocery bag he had hanging from his wrist. Ramen, because apparently they'd been surviving on MREs this entire time, and now they were reverting back to the cheap shit because it was all they had left. It explained the doughy blandness of everything he'd eaten so far. No wonder Matt had puked it up the first time. That peanut butter had been mostly oil.

It made him wonder who ate all the fucking steak Matt was talking about when he'd first come up here, all that time ago. Maybe they _did_ eat the fucking dog, because Foggy hadn't seen it since he'd gotten here. Gross.

He leaned back and searched the hallway to make sure it was empty before he pushed the door open carefully, expecting Matt to be right in front of him.

He wasn't, and Foggy frowned as he tugged the key out of the doorknob. "Uh, Matt?"

Something tall and lanky pounced him from the other side of the door, the direction of the bathroom, and he jerked in surprise. Nothing scary, just his half-feral ninja best friend, who was grinning his fucking face off and nearly gave him a goddamn concussion when he pushed their heads together.

"Foggy, Foggy, Foggy," he repeated, grabbing him all over. "Foggy, back."

"Of course I'm back. Where'd you think I'd go?" He shut the door with his foot and tried to keep Matt at arm's length-- impossible. It was as if he was making sure Foggy was totally real, not an illusion, not a fleeting cloud of smoke in that strange fiery way he saw the world. Foggy remembered the metaphor, even if Matt did not.

"Hey, chill out. I brought you food. Don't spill it."

He held out the bowl of noodles. No fork. Well, this was going to be an adventure. Matt grabbed it with a huffing 'thanks' and crossed the room to the chair-- still limping, but it looked a little better.

"Eat it slowly," Foggy said, putting warning in his tone as he locked the door behind him. The tone that Matt had always listened to, even when he was whole. Boss-dad-Foggy. It still worked. _Accuracy retained at 100%._ "No puking."

Because yeah, he'd gone to college, and he'd eaten his share of Ramen with the same blind bastard in front of him, and they'd both drank their share of alcohol, and, well, vomiting up Ramen noodles was an experience neither of them wanted to relive.

"Foggy, yes." He tilted the bowl in his hands, trying to work out how the fuck he was supposed to eat it. Matt needed to figure out utensils again. Foggy was pretty sure he understood knives.

"You wanna use a--" nope, he was using his fingers, his right hand, the steady one. Matt carefully picked individual noodles out of the mess and nibbled on them slowly. "Yeah, no, I guess you _don't_ wanna."  At least he'd had a shower before stuffing his fingers in his mouth.

"Mmph."

Foggy put the plastic bag on the table and sat down on the cot with a sigh, pulling his granola bar out of his pocket. He could eat something more substantial later, if he could sneak into the kitchen and grab another helping without being noticed. He chewed quietly, half-watching Matt and half-staring out the window at the green sky outside. A comfortable sort of silence blanketed them that he knew he wouldn't be able to share with anyone else.

Matt ate as he'd been directed-- slowly. The noodles were probably bland as fuck. He didn't really seem to mind at all. The smile on his face didn't fade. It stayed, content and happy-- because he wasn't alone anymore. All he really wanted was to _not_ be alone.

Foggy's stomach rumbled when he finished the granola bar. He folded the wrapper and saved it in his pocket for later. Matt had put the airplane from last night on the windowsill. One silvery wing flicked the green light of the sky back at him. He remembered Matt laying on the bed last night, frowning, devastated, and sighed.

Fucking Karen. Yeah, Foggy was still pissed off about it. And yeah, he could see where she was coming from, but she'd hurt _Matt_ , a guy who didn't even understand the emotion that was making it so painful, and she didn't _fucking care_. She'd just left. Uncomfortable with how much Foggy was touching the _disgusting, dirty feral_ , he bet.

His mind wanted to say some pretty awful things about her, but he held it back, because she was Karen, and he still cared about her even if she was half-robot.

Again, his stomach growled, as if in agreement. Matt's head tilted from the chair, and his eyes wandered around as he listened to something. Foggy realized what it was once Matt was standing up and offering out the rest of the noodles. His face sheltered a hopeful little smile.

"Foggy, hungry?"

Foggy wouldn't have refused it even if it was vomit. ...Okay, maybe if it was vomit. Because that was still _really gross_. "Thanks, man. You're awesome."

Matt's smile turned into that stupid earnest grin of his and he flopped back down on the chair, backwards, leaning his chest on the backrest and fiddling with the sleeves of his hoodie instead of the foam he'd exposed earlier. (He'd been yelled at far too many times for picking at the chair, and besides, there wasn't much of the chair left.) Foggy knew he was still hungry. Maybe he could sneak out something extra for dinner.

"What'd you do while I was gone, buddy?"

"Hm." Matt dipped his head and pushed the neckline of the hoodie against his chin, creating idle sensation for himself to enjoy. "Foggy, sleep."

"Slept, huh? Feel better?"

"Ngh. Yes."

"How's your leg?"

"Didn't... mmm, didn't m- _mess_ with it." He was trying inflections, still, mirroring the way Foggy said them. They sounded awful. They sounded _perfect_. "Itchy."

"Yeah, I know." It probably felt like gravel, on skin like his. "Does it hurt?"

"Hurts. Yes." Matt answered hesitantly-- not like his usual hesitance, the type that meant he had to find a word first. This was more like he didn't want to say it at all. "Not, um, not a lot."

Foggy swallowed a mouthful of noodles. _He didn't want Foggy to know he hurt_. That was something past-Matt would have done.

_No_ , his brain reminded him quietly, _it's just something that Matt_ does.

"You can tell me if it hurts, Matty. I'm a medical professional. It's my job to know."

Matt started spinning in the chair, pushing himself along with his good leg. "Professional, what is this?" He was going to break the damn thing with how often he spun in it. Foggy wondered what it felt like to his senses. He wished he could still ask.

"Professional means I do it a lot, and I'm good at it."

"Foggy, okay." _Translation: I understand_. "Not-not... um. Not a lot. Hurts."  _Translation: it hurts, but hell if I'm going to tell you how badly_. "It's... hn, the word." _Translation: I don't know the word that I'm trying to tell you_. "Foggy, help?" _Translation: Foggy, help?_

Well, that last bit sort of explained itself.

"Sure, dude." Foggy swallowed another mouthful of noodles.

Matt's eyes shifted around lazily. "Hn. It's... not-not cold."

"Not cold? It's warm?"

"Yes."

"What?" Foggy put the noodles aside and reached out to stop Matt from spinning in the chair. "It can't get too warm, that's a bad sign. Let me see."

Matt huffed and started chewing on the strings of his hoodie while Foggy grabbed his leg, folding the pants upward and gently settling the back of his hand against the skin that was wrapped in gauze. It wasn't too much warmer than the rest of him, but he knew Matt could feel a shift in temperature better than a fucking thermometer. When he'd known what a thermometer was. Foggy unwrapped a bit of the dressing to take a better look-- still red, still inflamed, and it still looked fucking agonizing.

"The antibiotics aren't working," he mumbled, half to himself, trying to swallow down his terror. _Fuck_ , they were probably far past expired and therefore far past worthless. Unfortunately, he was dosing a person who's entire body chemistry had been fucked sideways by the virus, and he didn't know what drugs he was resistant to or what was so effective it might actually do damage.

"Hn," Matt grumbled around the hoodie strings.

"You'll have to take something else." They didn't have anything else that was injectable, but that just meant Foggy wouldn't have to see the fear on Matt's face when he realized there was a needle in the room. "I guess you'll have to swallow pills after all, buddy. Sorry."

Matt made a face. Half disgust, half acceptance.

Foggy glared at him, tugging on the hoodie strings he was munching on. "Stop chewing on those. You'll choke."

"Won't."

"It's _'I won't'_."

Matt rolled his eyes. How the _fuck_ did he remember that shit? Muscle memory? "I won't," he repeated, dully, rubbing his chin on the backrest.

And he was right, he probably wouldn't. It didn't stop Foggy from imagining coming back to his room later and finding Matt dead from that exact thing, though.

He carefully replaced the gauze, tightening it down and trying to ignore the way Matt shielded his whine and flinched. Impossible. Foggy carefully lowered his leg back to the floor, rubbing his face, trying to remember what sort of antibiotics they had, trying to work out which might be the most effective. It was a crapshoot, really.

Matt nudged him with his good leg. "Foggy, okay?"

"What? Oh, yeah, I'm fine, buddy." He sighed. "I gotta figure out what to give you to stop your leg from getting infected."

"Foggy, disgusting, with a knife, chop it off?" Matt asked, the words from last night tumbling out of his mouth all at once in a half-ramble.

Foggy still smiled with pride at the attempt, at the way Matt had remembered after only hearing them once. It was pretty impressive, even if he hadn't put them back together in the right order. "I'm not gonna chop it off. I'm gonna get you another antibiotic, and that'll clear it up." Because it had to. He was _not_ going to lose this blind motherfucker to a goddamn infected wound after all the other crazy bullshit he'd survived through.

Matt yawned, rolling his chin on the headrest of the computer chair, hands idly dancing along the uneven surface of the backrest cover.

"You can get some more sleep, if you want."

"Foggy, no. Not tired."

"Yeah, probably not. You've been sleeping all day."

Matt tapped his tongue between his lips, looking for a word. He didn't find it, and ended up pulling the hoodie's neckline back up to his face again, eyes fixed in the middle distance as he rubbed the fabric on his skin. He looked utterly, disastrously, horrifyingly _bored._

Foggy jolted when he remembered the plastic bag he'd brought with him. "Right, Matty, I uh... I got you something." It was strange to say it to him instead of the other way around. Now he knew why his friend had given him things so often and so earnestly. It felt pretty fucking nice to be Santa.

Matt's response was doused with surprise. "Foggy. Me?"

"Yeah." He grabbed the bag and brought it over, pulling out one of the objects inside. He brushed a knuckle against the back of Matt's hand and guided it into his palm. Hopefully it was enough to distract him, enough to keep him occupied while Foggy continued his charade of normalcy in the infirmary.

He still had no fucking idea what the hell to do with him in the long run, but he shoved the worry down and focused on the task at hand, because he was good at that, at least.

Matt studied the object with his head tilted, fingertips roving gently around it, his eyes darting as he tried to figure out what it was. "It... cold? Met-- ...metal?"  _Metal,_ that was a new word.

"You'll work it out. Go ahead, Matty."

His eyebrows crumpled as he focused harder. "Fl-flat," he managed, slowly, another word scratched out of his own head, but it didn't look like he was going to be able dislodge any more. He gave up after another minute, huffing, "Foggy, help."

"All right, all right." He dug into the bag and pulled out the second part of the puzzle. "These go on your head." Foggy leaned forward and settled the foam parts gently over Matt's ears, then pulled out the last thing, the plastic case at the bottom of the bag.

"Listen to this, Matty."

He took the object from Matt's hands, sticking the disk inside, then turned it on and pressed play.

"Music. Do you remember?"

Matt jumped when the first track came on, then went still, eyes sweeping around lazily. A tiny smile migrated to the edges of his lips. He stayed frozen in place, like the music would leave if he moved too much, and _listened_ , totally entranced. Foggy felt a wild, warm surge of pride, and that stupid something else that he'd always fought back but now welcomed with a smile on his own face.

"It's a CD player, Matt."

Someone had found it scavenging a while back, and it had sat in the infirmary for a month before Foggy dug it out today. He still had the batteries that Matt had collected all that time ago, and now he finally had a use for them. The CD had been there since before Foggy showed up, covered in dust and unused. Vivaldi. He'd never listened to any of it himself, but he knew Matt probably had-- he'd loved that classical shit.

Matt still loved it. He settled his arms on the headrest of the chair and then his chin on top of them, that quiet little smile spreading across his face without the intention of leaving. The sound of violins could faintly be heard through the headphones. He lifted his head and carefully turned his head in Foggy's direction.

"Mine?" Matt asked quietly, eyes flicking around, trying to center on his face.

"Of course. If you want it."

"Yes. Foggy, yes." His fingertips came up, brushing lightly on the outside of the headphones, a feathery touch, like they'd crumble into dust if he treated them too roughly. "I want, want..." his voice stumbled and hurried to try again, "...I want it."

"Then it's yours."

At first, Foggy thought it might have been wasteful to use batteries on something like this, but once he saw the look on Matt's face, he immediately started searching through his mental inventory for where more might be stashed. He leaned forward and tapped Matt's hand to give him the portable player. Maybe he could find an MP3 player somewhere. And a computer to load the music on it with. And an Internet to _find_ the music with.

Eh, one step at a time.

"Here. Don't drop it."

"Yes," Matt breathed, grasping it gently with both hands, like it was the most valuable thing on the planet. His left hand held on harder, to prevent the tremors from shaking it out of his grip. "Foggy... thank. Thank you."

_Jesus Christ, there it is, genuineness, of course that'd be something he'd keep, god dammit, fuck you, Murdock._

He smiled anyway. "Enjoy it, buddy. I gotta go back now. Don't leave the room, okay?"

"Won't."

Foggy stopped for a minute to make sure the player was on repeat before leaving.

\---

He was digging through the cupboard for a bottle of antibiotics later in the evening when the infirmary door opened. Foggy leaned back to see who it was.

"Hi, Deb."

"Hey, Frank."

She had a gun in her hand. Foggy frowned, and did a double-take-- _shit_. His rifle. He'd left it in the Park like a total fucking moron, because _somehow_ , finding his best friend in the woods and realizing he wasn't totally fucking bonkers from the virus had distracted him from picking it back up again.

Foggy clamped his mouth shut and dove back into the cupboard. Fuck, he was _stupid._

Right, because leaving his fucking rifle in a panic was a dumber move than sneaking a goddamn feral into a shelter full of people that just loved to hunt them down and murder them _for funsies_. He felt that surging wave of protectiveness crashing through him that had only grown over time; now with Matt back, it became a tsunami, hot and dry and sickening in its strength. _Nobody_ was taking his friend from him again.

_Not yours!_ cried a voice in his head, not his own, and all his own. _Mine!_

"Look familiar? I found it in the Park today," Deborah said, putting it down gently on one of the tables. The barrel was still clogged with mud. "How the hell did it get out there?"

"Uhh?" His mind raced. "How would I know?" Foggy pawed blindly through the cupboard. He wished he could climb in and disappear into it. Hadn't they had more sedatives, before? "I don't go into the Park. You know that."

She scoffed, moving closer to him. He tried not to bristle. "You know, Frank, if you wanted to go out, you didn't have to go alone. I would have gone with you."

"Oh, that's-- that's nice of you, Deb, but I'm not really--" he coughed, "--I'm not a fan of walks, especially around ferals, you know?" How many more lies could he possibly tell to this woman?

"Yeah. That's funny, because I found something else out there."

Crap. "Oh?" Crap.

Deborah leaned against the counter next to him. He couldn't see her face, but she was probably twisting it up in disgust. She probably had her arms crossed. "Yeah. I found the big one out there. You know, the _big_ feral. The alpha. The one that... the one that killed Marco?"

"Really?" His voice cracked. His mind replayed that graceful killing blow Matt had landed expertly into the motherfucker's skull with a cinematic slow-motion that he suddenly really fucking hated. "Uh, wow."

She scoffed again, then shifted closer and slammed shut the cupboard door that he'd put between them. A frown was on her face. Not disgust, just worry. _Worry_ , for _him._ Nobody worried about him here. Nobody that wasn't feral, anyway. "Did you see what happened to it, Frank?"

"Nope." He turned away, quickly, but she circled around him.

"You sure?"

"Yep." He turned in the opposite direction, knowing how ridiculous it looked.

Deborah made an irritated noise at the back of her throat. Foggy was sure she was putting her hands on her hips. "You know, you don't have to lie to me, Frank. I can keep a secret."

Ha ha, _not this one_. "Deb, just... don't worry about it, okay?"

"Don't worry about the fact that something killed the alpha with a piece of insulating glass from a power line and you might have seen it? Yeah, all right."

Had that really been the alpha? Matt had taken it out like it was goddamn _nothing_. No, if there was an alpha, it would have been Matt. "I didn't see anything, Deb." He sighed, turning around. Time to drown a tiny fraction of truth in a half-ton of lies and thrust it into her face. "God. I was out walking, okay? It showed up and I dropped my gun. I ran. You know, like a bitch?"

She frowned. Her hands _were_ on her hips. "I'm not gonna tell anyone you went on a walk, Frank. I'm kind of glad you did. You need to get out more." She dropped her hands. "You're lucky I found your gun first. If Eric would have... well. You know how he is. He'd assume _you_ put that piece of glass in it."

Foggy chewed on the inside of his cheek. "I didn't." Fuck, why did he say that?

Deborah's face flashed a grin, and she leaned a little closer, raising her eyebrows. She spoke in a whisper. "Was it Batman?"

A shocked laugh bubbled out of his throat before he could stop it. "Uh, _what?"_

"Batman. You know. Feral Batman. The one that keeps breaking necks for us." She smiled. "The one that we ran into a couple days ago? Jack calls it that."

He wished he could talk to past-Matt and tell him they were calling him Batman. He'd probably laugh and tell him _Batman wasn't blind_ or _I'm better-looking_. "I, uh. I don't know. I didn't see him. It." Foggy rolled the lie around in his head before exposing it to open air. "I told you, I ran. I didn't see anything. At all. I was wandering around like a moron for fresh air and got attacked."

She didn't believe him. He knew she didn't believe him. She knew he knew she didn't believe him. Miraculously, Deborah didn't say anything about it. "Well. Be careful next time. Eric's already claiming the glory."

"What a surprise." Eric and Karen were goddamn soulmates with the feral-slaughtering thing. At least they were open about their brutality. "Did he go get its head like that other time?" _Really_ fucking open.

"Ugh, I don't think so. I hope not."

"Well. If he decides to throw a party or something, count me out, please. I'm, uh. I haven't been feeling great."

Concern mingled on Deborah's face with the aftershocks of disgust about Eric. "Sick again?"

"Yeah." What were good symptoms? Symptoms that still let him have food? "Headache. Dizzy. You know. I think allergies."

"It's November."

"Winter allergies exist."

Deborah laughed. "No, they don't."

"They do. They totally exist."

"Are you saying that as a medical professional? As a doctor?"

Foggy scoffed. "I'm not a doctor."

"Yeah? What'd you do before this?"

"Lawyer." Amateur nurse. Professional drinker. Top-level worrier. _Best friend of Daredevil, remember that crazy bastard?_   "Defense attorney."

Deborah's eyebrows raised. "You know, I can actually see that." She grinned again, and gestured to herself. "Insurance agent. _Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there_ ," she drawled, that silly jingle that somehow Foggy still fucking remembered.

He laughed, short and loud. "Nice, Deb. I'll look you up if I ever buy a new place."

"Yeah, if you get home _and_ life insurance, you get a discount."

"Life insurance? Post-apocalypse? Isn't that, like, guaranteed to backfire on you?"

"I said you got a discount, I didn't say it was _cheap._ "

Foggy smiled. It surprised him how genuine it was, and it must have surprised Deborah too, because a strange look passed over her face, and she let out a small, tittering laugh.

"Jack was right. I don't think I've seen you smile like that before."

He let the smile drop from his face. There was a reason why he felt okay again, and Deborah couldn't know what it was. She was nice, and she seemed a little more okay with the whole Feral Batman thing than the others, but she wouldn't let Matt live, either, and she'd be in the right for that. "...Yeah," he said, eventually, pushing his hair from his face. "Dunno. Been sleeping better, I guess."

"I'm glad to hear that." She crossed her arms and sighed, her gentle and humorous expression falling into characteristic seriousness. Not like Karen's. Deborah's face didn't go stone-still and her voice didn't sound like Matt's screen reader from back when the world was whole. "Don't forget to take your gun back with you. And clean out the barrel. I don't want you blowing off your arm because of a misfire."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And, um." She looked hesitant. She never looked hesitant. What? "You can always... you know. You can ask me. To go out and walk with you. I promise I won't run off on a wild safari hunt for the ferals."

Wait, _what?_ Foggy blinked slowly. "Uh... are you...?" he gestured back and forth between the two of them. "...Asking me out?"

Deborah blushed and laughed. "Ha, no, _never_ , that's ridiculous." She interpreted his bewilderment as denial, and turned away, hurrying off before he could stop her. "Bye, Frank. Watch out for Batman."

He stood alone in the infirmary for a long while, before turning back to the cupboard, grabbing the bottle of amoxicillin, and shoving it in his pocket, along with another couple rolls of gauze and tape. He shouldered the rifle as he walked to the door. Dinner soon. He could hear people talking on the other side of the wall where the garage-kitchen-whatever sat.

The day had lasted way too long. Foggy headed back to his room, deciding to venture out for food later. He wondered, if he timed it right, if he could grab two helpings and sneak it back with him. Sharing the food wasn't going to do anything to help Matt's weight problem. It didn't help that Matt was _always fucking hungry_. He'd probably kept his mouth shut about it before the virus took him because, surprise, Catholic bullshit.

"Get away from the door, buddy," he whispered as he put the key in the lock, trusting Matt to hear it. Foggy pushed the door open carefully and slipped inside, locking it behind him with one hand.

Matt was climbing up out of the cot, rushing to meet him, but his leg faltered when it touched the floor and he had to catch himself clumsily on the chair to stop from falling down. His face was uneven with pain, blooming with confusion and-- was he _crying_ again? No, just pain. That was worse.

Foggy put his rifle down on the table and crossed the space to him, reaching out to steady his shoulders. "Whoa, man, are you okay? You almost biffed it there."

"Nnngh, Foggy," was Matt's reply, slow and grinding. "Hurts."

"Yeah, you need to stop walking on that thing. Come on, back to the bed." He gently grabbed Matt's arm and guided him over. Stubborn bastard. "Here, sit. I'll take a look at it."

Matt whimpered, that high, sharp noise, as Foggy deposited him on the cot and turned to grab his first aid kit. God, that sound. He'd only made it when Foggy had been pouring fucking alcohol into the wound earlier. Worry clawed at his mind.

"Okay, let me see it."

As he unwrapped the gauze, he started cursing Jack out in his head for firing that arrow. In the back of his thoughts he knew that was the smart thing for the kid to do, and he'd needed to protect himself, but goddamnit, Matt's leg wasn't getting better and _someone_ had to eat the blame.

"Jesus. No shit it hurts." Foggy pressed his hand to the skin around the wound again, checking for warmth. It didn't seem much hotter than when he'd checked earlier, but the pus was coming back again, and that wasn't a good thing. Matt flinched under his touch, as gentle as it was, and he could tell the pain was radiating. "You _gotta_ stop moving around on it, Matty. It'll only hurt more."

"Was- _wasn't_ ," Matt said, pulling in a sharp breath through his nose. "Foggy, sleep. Music."

"You weren't moving around while I was gone?"

"N-no. Um, bath-bathroom?"

Right. He'd napped, listened to the CD player, and used the toilet, and it was still hurting like hell, getting redder, filling with pus, he couldn't fucking _walk on it_ \--

Okay, deep breath. Antibiotics. Antibiotics, before he started getting one those deadly red lines to his heart that would kill him in two hours no matter what drugs they had around to give to him. Foggy dug the bottle out of his pocket and shook out two of them mostly with his own nerves, putting them in Matt's hand. "Take these. You know how?"

Just like Foggy had predicted, he shoved the pills in his mouth and chewed.

"God, fuck, not like that. Jesus, Matt." He got back to his feet, getting a cup of water from the bathroom. Fuck it, he didn't care if he got in trouble for using too much. "Drink."

Judging by the look on Matt's face, they tasted like ass. More than one ass. All of the asses. Matt didn't spit them out, though, struggling to do what he'd been told to.

"Drink it all."

He nearly waterboarded himself at the speed he sucked it down. "Ugh. Foggy."

"Yeah, it tastes like shit. You aren't supposed to chew them."

Matt's eyes rolled. Was that him hunting words or was he actually just rolling his eyes, like he used to? "Foggy. Know. Know that. _Now_." Definitely both.

"You want something for the pain? I've got Tylenol."

"Tylenol, what is this?"

"It's... it'll make your leg hurt less."

"Foggy. Yes. Yes. Hurts." It was the closest to a sharp demand that Matt had ever gotten, even when refusing the injection from earlier. Foggy acquiesced, refilling the cup and handing it to him.

"Swallow the pills with this, Matty. You understand?"

"Um."

"Okay... put these in your mouth," he put the Tylenol in Matt's hand, and rushed out the next words, "don't-- hey, _don't_ chew on them. Good. Now drink the water and the pills, too."

Matt thought about the directions for a second, then, surprisingly, followed them.

"Great! That tastes better than chewing them, I bet." Hopefully the antibiotic wouldn't make him nauseated. Should have brought some food. "Finish the water. I'm gonna wrap this back up."

Matt did as asked, like always, then started rolling the cup between his palms, jaw working, tongue rolling around in his mouth. Disgust was still heavy on his face. "Tastes."

Foggy tossed the used gauze to the floor and went for the fresh roll. "Tastes what?"

"Fu... fucking-- fucking _bad_."

He coughed a hard snort that turned into a laugh halfway out of his mouth. Matt was using an adjective, which was good, but it was _the worst possible one_. "Hey, just because I say that shit, doesn't mean you can say it."

"Can say it. _I_ can say it, Foggy."

It was the longest complete sentence that Matt had ever said-- even if it was a modified echo. Foggy grinned and felt his eyes prickling with that stupid irritation (pride) but he ignored it as he leaned forward to concentrate on the job in front of him. He made to push the two edges of the wound together before wrapping it and Matt yelped and jerked, nearly bashing Foggy's nose off with his knee.

"Shh, shh, it's okay. Goddamn, Matt." It shouldn't have been so surprising. If Foggy had the same wound, he'd probably be sobbing and refusing to budge from the damn cot. He rested back on his heels, sighing. "You think if I put some stitches in there, you could stay fucking still for three days, so they can heal?"

Matt swallowed a whimper. "Stitches, what is this?"

"It's... you know, the stuff keeping the blankets together?" Foggy reached up and guided Matt's hand to a few of the loose threads he'd been fucking with for the past day. "Stitches, they're like that, but in your skin. They'll keep the wound together. It might heal faster that way."

"I want," Matt said, flinching as Foggy's hands touched his knee, nowhere near the wound. Yeah, he was on a _ten_ on that pain scale Foggy remembered seeing once at a hospital. Well, a _ten_ for a normal person. Probably somewhere around a _seven_ for Matt. "Hurts, Foggy."

"Okay. I'm gonna... I'm gonna go get them."

\---

"Nelson."

The voice halted him faster than a brick wall would have. He shoved the suture pack and bundle of instruments he'd grabbed deeper into his pocket and turned. God, he prayed he was still far enough away that Matt couldn't hear him.

Eric was leaning against the doorframe to the other hall, arms crossed, casual. Except _nothing_ was casual about this asshole. His face always carried a dark intensity, like he'd absorbed all of Karen's anger whenever he slept with her (and he did, a _lot_ , Foggy knew) and claimed it as his own. Like Karen, it was hard to tell what this man was thinking. Unlike Karen, it was because everything was always steeped in anger instead of emptiness.

Foggy cleared his throat. "What's up, man?"

"I've been hearing some interesting shit."

_Karen told him. Karen fucking told him. She told him about Matt and now Eric was coming to punish him, punish the both of them, he had to get to his room--_

Foggy let out a breath. Calm. He had to stay _calm._ If he freaked out, Matt would hear it, and Matt would come running, and then they'd both be fucking dead no matter what. "Yeah?" He shoved both hands in his pockets to stop them from shaking. "Like what?" Careful. Feel it out. Maybe she hadn't said anything. _Except she did, you know she did, you know it._

"That there's some crazy bastard out there killing other ferals for us."

_Okay, maybe she didn't say anything, keep your fucking head on, Nelson._ "Yeah. There were a few while you were gone. Broken necks, right outside the fence."

"Paige told me that she thought it was another feral."

_She didn't tell him_. Foggy tried not to feel premature relief. He wasn't out of this yet. He wouldn't be out of this until he and Matt were far, far away from this broken place. "Oh, yeah, I was talking about that with her the other day. I think she saw one of 'em killing another a while back."

"Yeah. And, apparently, there's a new alpha in town."

Foggy tried not to swallow or shake. "Oh?"

Eric grinned. It looked wilder than Matt's. "Yeah. It killed the old one. The big one."

"Oh."

"You don't know anything about that, do you?"

He felt suddenly very cold. "...No."

Eric's grin widened, monstrous. "Paige tells me otherwise."

Foggy chewed on his tongue, hard, to stop himself from bolting. He wanted to run. He wanted to go back to his room and make sure Matt was okay and-- he didn't even know. They had to leave. They had to leave before Eric killed both of them. "I barely talk to her, you know that."

"You talk to her. And she talks to me."

"...What did she tell you?"

Eric shrugged, glancing around the hallway as if in boredom. "That you like to go for walks in the woods." He pushed off the wall and took a step forward. Foggy struggled to stand his ground. "That you've gone out recently." Eric drifted closer. "That you've got a friend on the other side, Nelson."

His stomach churned and rolled, but he didn't budge. He knew his heart was pounding. _Please just ignore it, Matt, please, just ignore it. Please be listening to that damned music full-blast right now_. Foggy forced a smile across his face and sarcasm into his nearly-shaking voice. "Oh yeah, I love hanging out with the ferals. They're great conversationalists."

Eric leapt forward, grabbing Foggy's shoulder, pinning him to the wall. "Don't fuck with me, Nelson, you know better than that." His growl was loud, but it wasn't scary. Foggy had heard far scarier: the machine. "You're a sympathizer."

"A what?" He'd never even heard this term.

"Don't play dumb, Nelson, because you fucking aren't. Should've known it earlier, after you told us you lived in the Kitchen for two straight years. You were living with _them."_

Well, yes and no. Foggy tried to sound bemused. He wasn't sure how it ended up. "Are you serious? Really? I was living with a bunch of crazy infected human beings for two years without getting murdered?"

"Stranger things have happened."

"Have they? Failed alien invasion and the sky turning green, that's pretty high on the list of strange-ass shit, Eric, but really? Living with zombies?" He didn't like using that word. For starters, it was completely incorrect. Also, the word just reminded him of that damn TV show that he never got to finish _before the world ended._

"You're not to leave the shelter again," Eric growled, hand loosening against Foggy's chest. "You're worth too much."

"Aw, how sweet." Yeah, now he was feeling a little better, a little ballsier, since it was apparent that Eric had no fucking clue Foggy was hiding the most dangerous feral of them all _in his goddamn room_. Thank fuck he'd gotten a place with a door that locked. "Don't worry about me, cupcake. I don't intend on taking another stroll anytime soon." _Thank you, thank you God-- no, thank you Deb, for finding my goddamn rifle before anyone else could._

"Good." Eric took a step back, finally moving out of Foggy's space. His hands hung down at his sides, and Foggy gave him a glance, partly because he was their medic, it was reflex and it was his job, and partly because--

His stomach rolled, sharp and sudden and freezing cold.

Eric's left hand was shaking.

"...Uh."

Eric realized what Foggy had seen and jerked back, as if just noticing it himself. He shoved his hand in his pocket, but it was too late now. A look passed over the man's face: fear, anger, shock. Then he turned back to Foggy and leaned forward, voice low, dangerous.

"Tell anyone, Nelson, and I'll fucking kill you."

The finality in the words sent a shivery jolt through Foggy's spine. He opened his mouth, trying to respond with something, but Eric was already moving away down the hall. When the other man disappeared around the corner, Foggy turned the other way and hurried to his room.

Matt was waiting patiently on the bed, the headphones on and music whispering, and Foggy plastered his smile on and tried not to think too hard as he sat down next to him. He clenched his fists for a few long moments to stop them from trembling, and went to work placing Matt's stitches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _We're reeling through an endless fall._  
>  _We are the ever-living ghost of what once was._  
>  Band of Horses


	10. end transmission (side: paige)

Karen woke up in her room to a dull, pounding ache in the back of her head and a groan in her mouth. Groggy. Her dreams, this time, had been filled with dusty offices and a soft, gentle voice. Weird. She rolled over, pressing her face into her worn mattress and sighing.

She climbed up out of her bed and stretched, feeling the strain in her back where she'd been slammed to the floor the other day. If she thought about it, she could still feel the cool metal of her own knife at her neck and the blast of a hot snarl over her face.

 _Soon_ , she thought, as she stood up and moved to her bathroom. Frank was still alive, so he still had the feral under control, which meant she could wait. No way in hell was she going to try to shoot the damned thing while it was conscious. She was hoping that the feral would die from the wound on its knee. If it was infected already, it wouldn't be much longer. And if Frank was stupid enough to try to get it into the infirmary for treatment, she'd be there with Eric, and then the problem would be solved. _Soon._

Karen rubbed at her forehead, squinting at the pain in her skull. She took a few Advil and downed them with a sip from the bottle that was still sitting on the table next to her bed. Just to get rid of the headache, she told herself.

She pulled on her clothes and her boots and shouldered her rifle. It was early, yet. Karen moved down the hallway. She didn't want to pause at Frank's room, but she did, and it was quiet. Maybe some faint whispering. The damned door was too thick, and she knew if she lingered, the feral would hear her.

 _Matt,_ said that sing-song voice that hid far and deep in the back of her mind, where she couldn't reach it and scratch it out. _His name's still Matt. Matt Murdock, you remember? Saved your goddamn life and never asked a thing in return?_

Karen clenched her jaw to ward that stupid fucking voice off and continued to the kitchen. She grabbed a Styrofoam noodle cup, filled it with cold water from the tap, and took it with her, snatching a plastic fork on her way out.

The sky was pale green as the sun started to rise over a clumped bunch of greying clouds to the east. She shut the spotlights off and climbed up to the tollbooth, setting her breakfast down beside her as she rested her gun against the rail. Karen shivered in the late-November chill, wondering if it would snow. It hadn't snowed since the world ended. She tugged her knitted cap out of her jacket pocket and pulled it on.

Waiting for the water to soften the noodles, she listened. This morning wasn't any different from the rest. Quiet, cold. She could hear the gentle hum from the electric fence and the distant rattle of the generator. Someone was dicking around in one of the garages behind her, probably Brian, putting Deborah's truck back together. Karen would normally be helping. She was decent with tools.

Right now, though, she just wanted to watch the Park and enjoy the solitude.

Unfortunately, Karen's brain had a vindictive shitfest ready for her today, because it kept saying things, showing her images, insistent. It just would _not fucking stop._

_Trust Foggy. You did before, and he never set you wrong. Trust him._

A dusty old office, poorly-furnished and smelling like fresh paint. A wide apartment, all brick walls and high, arched windows. A glaring billboard flickering with advertisements, colors spreading over a sparse floor like pooling liquid, each reflecting a different world, a different time.

Gentle and easy grinning on a face she thought she'd never see again. A man in clothes that were too big for his gaunt body, nevertheless offering her food, his own food, hopeful and quiet. Two hands, one trembling and weak, the other deft and steady, fiddling with nothing.

"Ugh."

Karen grumbled it aloud, to herself, and rubbed her face harshly. God, shut up. It wouldn't. It didn't. She picked up her noodles and started stuffing them into her face even though they were still crunchy. Karen chewed vigorously, hoping that the sound would silence the thoughts in her whirling head. It didn't.

Ghosts of sensation on her arms and chest, Eric's hands. His hungry growl in her ear. Her treacherous, ridiculous mind brought another growl around for comparison. Anger leapt up her throat when she realized the latter of the two was the less frightening one.

_Stop. Shut up. Just shut up._

She finished her noodles and glared at the emptiness of the cup. Then she lifted her head and glared out into the Park. The distant clouds roiled, silver and gold, and she knew they would break apart before ever getting close enough to bring rain. All the mud that clawed through the Park was created by the river, she knew. Hence the smell.

Karen sighed and rubbed her face with her chilled hands. For a moment, she thought her damn brain was done showing her shit, but then it forced the image and sound of two men-- a stupid, co-dependent _ex-lawyer_ and _barely-doctor_ and a _dangerous, psychotic animal_ \-- laughing softly as they enjoyed a broken little embrace. Two seconds of comfort in a world of fire and terror and ashes that they were all trapped in.

She pushed her fingers into her eyes until she saw multicolored spots. _Stop. Stop. Please just stop._ It didn't help.

So Karen got up from the tollbooth, pulling her rifle back over her shoulder. She grabbed the empty cup on her way down and walked back inside, frowning at her returning headache.

\---

Eric wasn't anywhere to be found. She normally ran into him in the mornings, before he went out in his truck and into the city, but when she went to the garage, his truck was already gone. Karen was surprised to feel glee in her chest at the knowledge that he wasn't here.

Already out scavenging, then. She hadn't been invited, but she felt... well, she _thought_ she felt okay about it. What she _did_ know was that she really didn't want to be at the shelter, either. She wasn't sure where she _did_ want to be. Nowhere. Anywhere. Somewhere _else._

She passed by the infirmary door and heard Frank's voice, conversing quietly alongside Jack's. Karen paused to listen, then thought better of it-- there was no reason for her to hide-- and put her hand on the doorknob instead, pushing it open quietly.

Frank was there, his back to her, removing the stitches from Jack's shoulder. Karen slipped in behind them, and stayed silent. They didn't notice her.

"You know, you're lucky you're so young, Jack. Doesn't take long for you to heal, does it?"

"Maybe I'm Spider-Man."

"You aren't Spider-Man."

"I _could_ be Spider-Man."

Frank scoffed, removing another suture and rubbing it off carefully onto a piece of gauze. "Trust me, you aren't." He leaned in close. "I think Spider-Man was _way_ older than you."

Jack puffed himself up. "I'm not that young."

"You're twenty-four. You're just a baby."

"A _baby?_   And how old are _you_ , Methuselah?"

"Thirty-five."

Jack scoffed. "That's not old at all. Still got fifty years ahead of you."

Frank laughed at that, a loud snort. "Oh, yeah. Fifty years of expired pasta, MREs, and aliens. Can't fucking wait." He clipped out the last suture and put it down, wiping the area carefully with another piece of gauze. "Another wicked scar to show off to the ladies, Jackie."

"Don't call me Jackie, man. And I'm not... uh, _for_ the ladies."

"Ah." Frank was grinning. "No judgments, man, you know I'm cool."

"Yeah, I know, you're--"

Jack fell quiet as he turned to grab his sweater and caught sight of Karen standing next to the door. Frank took notice and turned. The smile fell from his face and the conversation dropped away. He turned back into that silent, stone-faced man that had kept himself between her and his pet fucking feral without the intent to budge.

"Hi," Karen said, lifting a hand.

Jack was the only one who replied, and it was a faint, "Yo," before he tugged his jacket on over his shoulders and moved toward the door. "Oh, yeah, Frank." He paused and dug around in his pocket. "Not as good as the penicillin, but..." he took out something thin and silver and tossed it across the infirmary.

Frank caught it, and a smile tried to flash across his face, but Karen knew he stifled it so that she would not see it. "Sweet, man. Thanks a ton."

"Hope it brings you luck, dude." Jack gave him a wave. "Gotta go, though. Deb and I are meeting Eric up near the Washington."

"The bridge?"

"Yeah. You know, that boat I was talking about the other day?"

Frank blinked and then nodded. "Oh, yeah. The boat."

Jack laughed. "You're such a space case sometimes." There wasn't anything sharp or hard in his voice, not that Karen could hear. "We'll be back this evening."

"Be careful."

"I'll be fine, Methuselah." Jack waved again, gave Karen a short, stiff nod, and left.

An uncomfortable silence filled the room and it shocked her that she was able to recognize it as such. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and watched Frank toss out the used gauze before moving to clean his tools in the sink.

Eventually, he spoke, because he was Foggy, and Foggy always tried to break silences even if he'd instigated them in the first place. "So, uh. You just gonna stand there and stare, or..."

Karen fiddled with the seam in the lining of her pocket and looked at the floor.

"Right, stand there and stare. Got it." His tools rattled as he slammed them into the sink. He'd never really been the passive-aggressive type, but he was obviously desperate to get her to fuck off. "You kinda remind me of someone when you do that, you know?"

She felt herself trying to frown and stopped it. "Do what?"

"Oh, you know, the standing there, fidgeting, not saying anything shit. Looking like a puppy that's been kicked around too much. Definitely a _Matt_ thing." He said the name smoothly, because there was no-one around, so he was apparently feeling a little ballsy. She wished Eric had been there to hear it. She also wished Eric would never fucking come back.

"I was thinking about something last night," Frank said, bending down to fish an old toothbrush out from under the sink, "about how much you two have in common with each other."

Karen felt herself bristling and knew it showed. "I'm nothing like h-- like _that thing."_

Frank gave her a hollow grin, turning to the sink to scrub at a few of the tools with the toothbrush. "Really? I'm about to blow your fucking mind, then." He took a pair of scissors out and studied them in the light before he set them aside on a piece of gauze. "Don't understand emotions? Check."

"Hey--"

"Go all dead-eyed-rage-monster when you're mad? Check."

She clenched her fists and stepped across the infirmary toward him.

"Get all broody and quiet when you don't know what to say, like you want me to say it for you? Oh, that's definitely a check. Don't mind it with Matty, though, 'cause he can't help it."

Karen was almost to him now. "Frank--"

"And! _And_." He turned before she could spin him around, staring her down, eyes bright and furious. In the harsh fluorescent lighting, they were a cold grey-blue, like the sky had been in the mornings before the poison changed it. "Both of you kinda need to get your shit put back together and neither of you know how to fucking do it."

"I'm not fucking feral." Even now, she whispered the last word. She was not sure why.

"You haven't got the disease. The rest of you, though, Paige... the rest of you doesn't have a fucking excuse." He moved past her, surgical tools in his hands, jostling her with his shoulder. "I've seen what you've done to some of them. You and Eric." Frank blinked and paused as if saying the other man's name had pained him. He carefully set his cleaned tools down and rolled them up in gauze before taping it shut. He placed the pack into his bag and tapped his fingers on the table. His voice dropped a little in volume.

"He's a lot like them, Paige. Did you notice that?"

"No, he's not."

Frank chewed at his bottom lip, unsure. He'd been so arrogant just a second ago. Why was he so goddamn confusing all the time? "Paige, I mean..." he looked at the table, then back to her, "...he reminds me of them. A lot."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

He let out a sigh, shaking his head. "...I guess nothing." There was something in his voice, something low and quiet and afraid, but she couldn't place it. "Just... just be careful around him. Okay?"

"Says the man with that _thing_ in his room."

Both of them glanced around on reflex after she said it, making sure there wasn't an onlooker that had appeared in the last few minutes, and Karen felt disgust in herself that she'd done it at all. Didn't she _want_ someone else to learn about Matt, so she wouldn't have to be the one--?

 _What?_   Of course she wanted to be the one to kill him. _It._

Didn't she?

Karen let out a sharp breath and rubbed her face. God, her brain today. She couldn't wait for the evening, so she had an excuse to stay in her room and not talk to anyone. "Just stay out of it, okay? Eric runs things how he runs things."

"Yeah, but he doesn't run the shelter."

"Nobody runs the shelter."

Frank rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I think that's part of the problem, here. Someone should be in charge. Everyone just comes and goes as they please. It's total fucking chaos."

Karen shrugged. "It's worked pretty well so far."

"It won't last forever."

"Does anything?"

"Yeah, actually." He zipped up his bag and pushed it down the table a little, leaving it mostly clear for the next time he'd have to come in here and put someone back together. Frank made for the door, quickly, and she knew he was in a rush to go back to his room and make sure she hadn't killed the feral while he was gone.

She still spoke after him. "Okay. And what is that?"

"You wouldn't understand, even if I told you." He slammed the door behind him.

\---

She spent the rest of the day in the tollbooth, alone, brooding. Well, she was pretty sure it was brooding. Fighting back her own thoughts as she tried to concentrate on anything else. She felt like she was halfway to insane already, which infuriated her even more, because she'd just remember Frank's comparison to his best friend and the traitorous part of her brain would agree with him.

One feral got a little too close in the afternoon and she took it out with a single shot, spraying blood and brains all over the mud. She should have felt a thrill, she knew. She should have felt _something._

She didn't feel anything.

Karen pulled the bolt back and chambered a new round, listening to the empty cartridge clatter on the floor of the tollbooth and feeling her face trying to frown. She fought it, and lost, as she stared out at the corpse. She thought of a man in clothes too big for him and let herself frown harder.

"Stop," she finally breathed, to herself, into the chilly air. "Please stop."

Nothing stopped.

Karen stayed up there until dinner, ignoring her hunger and watching the feral's body grow cold and still in the mud. The clouds bundled up harsh over the horizon, coming closer.

Apparently they weren't going to break apart before reaching them. It had been a long time since they'd had a cloudy day.

Huddling her jacket up around herself, she climbed back down to the courtyard, shifting the strap of the rifle on her shoulder. She needed a goddamn drink. She needed to stop thinking. Her mind roiled and _itched_ and she felt like she was going fucking insane.

She grabbed a cup of noodles and sat against the wall in the kitchen, eating quietly. Nobody else around. Karen liked to come in after everyone else, to enjoy the quiet, to avoid the need to pretend she gave a shit. She wished she did. She wished that any of this mattered.

Halfway through her dinner, and there was a rumble of an engine outside-- Jack or Eric returning from the bridge. She didn't want to see Eric at all; she hoped it was Jack. Maybe he'd found something decent today, so they could stop eating noodles for every fucking meal. Her stomach was starting to reject all the dry starch and sodium.

Someone ran down the hall past the infirmary, but she didn't look. The door to the garage opened and slammed shut. Karen took another bite, staring at the floor. Her mind tried to bring up another image, an offering from a hand that shivered with an unnatural harshness, and pushed her free hand across her face, growling, infuriated at herself, begging silently for it all to just fucking _stop--_

A _bang_ and a yell grabbed Karen's attention, startled her mind to a hard halt. She lifted her head and she could hear voices, shouting in the hallway, in the direction of the garage. They were moving to the infirmary.

"Hold that! Put pressure on it--"

"--Oh, Jesus, his fucking stomach--"

"--They're coming, they're _coming--"_

" _\--Hey!_ Don't panic! Keep pressure on it! Don't--"

"--Jack, Jack, oh my God, Jack, please--"

There was the slam of the infirmary door being opened and shut, and everything became muffled. Karen climbed up off the ground and went to get a look. A wide trail of blood caught her attention immediately, dripped and smeared from the garage to the infirmary, where shoes had mashed into it and printed on the linoleum floor like a child's stamp collection.

Karen got to the infirmary door and opened it. The smell of the river and mud and that strange burnt-plastic tang met her nose. What met her eyes was an image she was far too familiar with, except not from this angle-- someone on the infirmary table, shrieking in pain, two others holding him down and a third trying to fix him while his blood flowed far too freely and puddled on the floor.

"Coming," Jack cried, delirious, his spine jerking, either from agony or reflex, "they're coming!"

Frank wasn't listening to him; he was way more focused on trying to stop the bleeding. "What the fuck happened?!" he demanded, dragging over one of the tables, scraping its legs on the floor. He moved with a startling amount of grace and calm, despite his taut voice and the fact that he was already splashed with Jack's blood; up alongside his face, down the front of his shirt, a handprint dragged down his shoulder.

Deborah was shaking her head jerkily, rapid and afraid. It reminded Karen of someone else. "I don't know! Eric brought him back!"

"He was out at the bridge?"

"I don't _know!"_

"Where is Eric now?!"

_"I don't fucking know, Frank!"_

Nobody noticed Karen as she stood in the doorway. Frank's eyes were wide but his face set into stone as he placed gauze and clamped off vessels and moved with a solemn grace to try and save him-- save Jack, whose screaming was starting to trail into sharp groans of confused agony. There was something whitish hanging off him, dangling down the table. What the fuck was that?

"Deb, take a deep breath, Jesus, stop panicking," Frank barked out, yanking another pack of instruments from his bag, ripping it open and finding another clamp. "Get an IV bag ready." At her hesitation, he shouted, sharp and sudden, grabbing her attention, forcing her into focus. "Deborah! _Now!_ "

Karen caught the other woman's eyes, but Deborah didn't notice, moving as she'd been told to the supply cabinet, the one nearest to the heater, pulling out a bag and a line. Her hands shook. Everyone shook.

"Good," Frank said from the table, where Brian was holding Jack down and sobbing like a child. "Take the bag, hold it against your body. Keep it warm. If I put it in him while it's still cold, it'll make the shock worse."

"Yeah, okay," Deborah said, faintly, pulling the bag against her chest.

"Take a fucking breath. Breathe," Frank ordered, not even looking at her, and Karen had never fucking seen him so composed. Not even in court, in his past life. He placed another clamp and pushed another handful of gauze into the gaping tear in Jack's stomach. Oh, those were his intestines. Those were his fucking guts hanging down off of the table. Frank grabbed a needle from his bag-- no, an IV-- and a rubber band and moved to put it into Jack's arm. "Keep the fucking saline warm, Deb."

He missed the vein four times, hit it on the fifth, and made a low noise of victory as the blood bloomed through the needle. "Okay, get the-- the IV line-- you know what it looks like?"

"Yeah." Deborah had already dug it out. "Do I just--"

"Self-explanatory. The pointy end goes into the bag, the non-pointy end goes into this." He waved at the IV that he'd gotten in, pushing his thumb against the opening to stop what little blood Jack had left from dripping out. Deborah put the other end of the line in his hand and he placed it, nodding back to her. "Roll the wheel in that plastic bit to open it. Keep it against your body, keep the line wide open. Make sure it keeps dripping. Okay?"

"O-okay..."

"Deep breath, Deborah, you are not fainting on me right now."

"No. No, I'm not."

"Good. Hold the bag," Frank said to her, turning back to the table. Jack's breathing was shallow, and he wasn't making noises anymore. His skin was white, like paper. Frank lifted the gauze he'd pushed in, shaking his head. "He's losing blood too fast," he said, grabbing more gauze, trying to staunch the flow. It wasn't working. There was blood _everywhere_. She never knew a human body could hold so much blood.

Brian finally talked, but it was more of a shout, through hysterical sobbing. "He's gonna die, isn't he? He's gonna die!"

"Shut up, dammit, I'm trying," Frank snapped back at him, getting more clamps, eyes darting over the yawning cavern torn into the kid's stomach, the slick white pieces of him hanging out and down over the table like fucking ropes. His face stayed calm. His eyes were full of terror.

Karen remembered, suddenly, the time Frank told her that Matt had come back to him one night with his guts hanging out, and she felt relief. He'd done this before. He could do it again. He had to.

"God, no, no no no no," Frank hissed suddenly, moving from the mess at Jack's stomach up to his face. Brian started shouting, noises of pain and horror. Frank yelled at him, "Shut up, shut the fuck up, shut--"

"He's not breathing! He's not breathing!"

Karen watched the kid on the table shivering, like he'd been stuck out in a cold wind for too long, and Frank was tilting his head back and breathing for him, pushing his hands against Jack's sternum, one-two-three-four-five, breathe, breathe, one-two-three-four--

"Jack! Jack, Jack, no, oh God, Jack--"

\--Two-three-four-five, breathe, breathe--

Brian sobbing, high and tortured. Deborah pale and still a few feet away, clutching the IV bag, knuckles as white as Jack's skin. Nobody speaking. Only the sounds of fear and disbelief, instinctive, like so many lost animals.

\--Four-five, breathe, breathe, one-two--

Jack's shivering stopped.

\--Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe--

It was over.

\--Five-six-seven-eight-nine--

Frank let out a noise that was half-cough, half-sob. Rested his forehead on Jack's unmoving chest. He was whispering. Hysterical. "Fuck, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Jack. I'm sorry. I tried. I'm sorry."

Brian crumpled and Deborah didn't do anything, shivering and pale, holding the IV bag even though there was no longer reason to. One voice screaming in pain, another quietly sobbing, a third total silence, and the fourth no longer existed. Karen stood in the doorway and couldn't move. All she could do was witness it.

Until a strong hand pressed against her back, then snaked around her waist. Karen felt herself stiffen all over when she heard Eric's voice purr in her ear, felt him slip the tranquilizer gun into her hand. "It's time, Paige. That's the last of us they're ever going to kill." He didn't sound upset about Jack being dead a few feet away. He sounded thrilled to have a reason to go out butchering.

Karen stared at the still and silent body on the table before letting Eric pull her out of the door and down the hall.

\---

She came to a conclusion a hundred meters into the woods:

"That wasn't a feral attack."

Eric tossed a look over his shoulder at her. "Yeah, it was. I was there." He was lying. She knew he was lying. She didn't say anything. Some terrified corner of her mind stopped her.

Karen still managed to slow to a stop. A sharp wind blew through the Park, freezing cold. She opened her mouth and asked, "How could a feral cut him all the way open like that?"

"With a knife."

 _They're coming_ , Jack had shrieked, in the short minutes before he'd died. _They're coming._

Eric let out a harsh sigh of impatience and stepped toward her. His hands were in his pockets. She thought it was strange he wasn't holding a gun.

"Can't you see it's getting dark, Paige?" There was nothing but anger in his voice. It sounded like he'd just gotten over a bad cold, a sore throat. "We're running out of time. Come on." He was in such a hurry. So eager to find something and kill it. Eric was impulsive, but never heedless, not like this.

Something in the way he stared at her, standing in the mud, in the half-darkness, made her shiver with instinct, and she took a step backwards.

He scoffed. "Paige," he repeated, and stopped suddenly, blinking hard, like he'd just been hit with a headache. He rubbed his forehead and let out a breath.

Karen stared at him. Why did she let him take her out here? "Eric," she said, keeping her voice soft, because she didn't want to enrage him, and she didn't want to be the focus of it. "It's cold. Let's go back."

"No." The word was a high scoff. A low bark. He took a step closer; she took another step back. Eric lifted his hands in irritation.

Her heart was hammering in her chest as she stared at him. "Your arm, Eric." From here, even in the dark, she could see it. A tremor. She'd been close enough to Matt to know the appearance of it from proximity. Eric had a tremor.

He took another step. "It's nothing."

She backed away. "Eric."

"I'm telling you, it's nothing."

"Your arm is shaking."

"Leave it alone, Paige."

Again, he pressed forward. Again, she retreated. She slowly drew the tranquilizer gun from behind her. Karen blew out a breath, felt it catch in her throat and behind her teeth, felt everything inside of her fluttering, cold and weak. The words tumbled out all at once, in a hiss, fear and anger. "You're infected."

"No." Eric shook his head. A harsh jerk. Because the tremors prevented any sort of sweeping, lengthy movement of his head. Just like Matt. "I'm not."

"Your arm," she said, because it was all she needed to say.

He laughed. It was low, percussive. It was not Eric's laugh. "Put the gun away, Paige."

She lifted it instead, centering it on his chest. "You're infected," she said again, even though he wasn't listening. Nobody was listening. There was nobody nearby.

She was alone with a feral.

Eric stared at the gun, blinking slowly, rage settling onto his face. It staggered across his facial muscles all at once, like someone had flicked a switch inside of him. His whole body tensed, stiffening. A harsh huff blew from his lungs, so familiar, and then it started: the low and rumbling growl, not human and not animal.

Karen made to pull the trigger, but didn't have time.

He lunged for her with a roar that split the dark air and stabbed deep into her brain, the places she could never reach on her own, cutting loose panic and terror and anger. She backpedaled in the mud, lifting the gun, but then Eric was on top of her, snapping at her face. His teeth closed with a sharp noise inches away from her nose.

Karen shoved him back before he could make contact with her face, scrambling backwards. A scream bubbled from her throat, high and sharp and _weak_ , but she could hear it echo, and prayed that somebody was listening. Everyone was inside, she thought, because of Jack. Deborah and Frank and Brian. They wouldn't be able to hear her.

A sudden wave of horror crashed into her: Eric had done all of this on purpose. He'd probably been away from the shelter all that time to hide it, because she hadn't seen a bite wound anywhere on him in all of those suffocating moments in his room since he'd returned. Nausea crept up her throat.

_He's a lot like them, Paige. Did you notice that?_

Frank had been trying to warn her, and she'd brushed it off in irritation. Why hadn't he just said it? Was he afraid? Had Eric threatened him?

Her stomach rolled alongside the next fervent question that flitted through her head: had Eric already passed it to her?

None of it mattered. None of her worries made a difference for another second longer, because Eric surged forward and attacked her before anything else could surface as a thought. There was death on his expression, in the stiff curve of his back, in the wild tremor that rocked through his arm. His face wasn't his anymore. Twisted, pale, teeth bared, his body filled with that horrible noise that seemed to pour out of him from everywhere. He snapped again, trying to get closer, scratching at her chest, against her jacket.

She was strong, but he had fifty pounds on her. He dug his fingers into her jacket as she tried to back away more, and got a grip on her, flinging her into a tree. She screamed again. No words, just a scream. She wished she could shriek _'Help',_ but she couldn't give up the focus on Eric to concentrate on the word.

He was going to kill her. He was going to _infect_ her. She would gladly take the first option if she had the choice, but she wasn't sure she did. Karen tried lifting the gun again but he knocked it out of her hands, sending it spinning to the mud a few meters away.

She reached behind her for her knife. Eric had the pistol, she thought, at the small of his back, but she knew she wouldn't be able to get close enough without him biting her.

Karen got the knife halfway out before Eric got to her first, grabbing her arm, trying to throw her to the ground. She stumbled but never fell, recovering quickly, because she was light on her feet, always had been. The knife was in her hand before Eric was on top of her again, pure rage, a being comprised of only instinct and fury. His noise was everywhere. It was everything.

Karen screamed again, for help, for _anyone_. Eric cut her voice off by shoving her to the ground, pouncing her, grasping for her neck. She took a breath, screamed one last time, because his hands would be on her soon and he would be strangling the words out of her. Her voice was high and broken, desperate, and she knew that nobody was going to answer.

But then someone answered.

From nowhere, a blur of blue and brown and black came, _roaring_ , and Karen thought that the sound of it might have been Eric, but it was too far away, coming closer, Christ, it was _another feral--_

No. Not just a feral. Dark hair and a pale face and wild, unfocused eyes. _Matt._

He'd heard her. He'd heard her, probably from the very first scream, and somehow, he'd gotten out of the shelter, over the fence, and into the Park. _He's only here to help his fellow animal_ , was a short thought in the back of her head, but it sputtered and died, because a second later he reached them, and his target wasn't her.

He charged in as a tempest, a demon straight from fucking Hell, following behind the noise he'd made like its monstrous shadow. One of his hands grabbed Eric's hair, and Matt ripped him away from Karen and into the mud behind them with a bellowing snarl and a strength she couldn't believe. She scrambled to her feet, pawing around her neck to make sure she had no open wounds.

Eric scrabbled back in shock, heaving for breath, trying to howl out a curse, but the virus choked his voice up in his throat and he said nothing.

But Matt was stronger. Matt could speak through it.

"Not yours," he rumbled, and placed himself between her and Eric. His shoulders were stiff, left hand shuddering heavily at his side. His words were oddly soft, and played beneath the growl like white noise in an unfocused radio. "Go away."

Eric was already too far gone to understand. He got his hands under him, and fought back to his feet. There was mud scattered all over his clothes, hair out in all directions. His growl was low, inhuman, _feral_ , and his teeth were bared, stained by dirt and age. He blasted a snarl from his lungs.

And Matt, rising to his challenge, returned it. The noise rumbled in Karen's chest like a distant explosion. Eric sounded like a whisper in comparison. Matt paced between him and her. A loaded weapon. A bear trap of flesh and bone. "Go away. _Go away._ "

But Eric no longer understood him. Eric understood nothing but instinct. All of him was gone in an instant, ripped out and burned away and scattered as ash on a blistering wind. And Karen had stood there and watched it happen.

The same thing had happened to Matt, but somehow, he had kept _his_ ashes, snow-white and weak, but they were there, little pieces of himself, in his own two hands with a grip that was not going to falter. He spoke in a rumble, head tilted in Karen's direction. "Safe," was what he said to her, between growls, and in it, she could hear the voice of the dead man that was trapped inside the animal.

_I'll keep you safe, Karen._

She was a statue. She couldn't move. Nothing was working. Not even her thoughts were doing anything, just moving in slow, confused circles. She needed to be grabbing the tranquilizer gun from the ground, but she didn't. She still had her knife at the small of her back. It didn't move.

Eric lunged suddenly and Matt moved like a ghost, slipping out of the range of a wild swing and a desperate grapple like he'd seen it coming a week ago. He retreated backwards, feet steady despite blood trailing down his left leg-- the wound, the _infected_ wound-- and he kept growling, grabbing Eric's attention, holding it hostage with his own body. Eric snapped for the bait, the stupid fucking feral that he was, surging forward, his movements quickened by the virus that burned bright and wild within the both of them.

Karen willed her stupid fucking body to cooperate, and it did, barely, enough for her to retreat toward the tranquilizer gun, bend to grab it, and get it into her hands. She tried to aim at them but they were too entwined, circling and snarling and snapping at each other, two animals fighting for dominance. Partners in a broken, deadly allemande that was being dragged out in the black mud.

Eric swung out with a rattling noise, and Matt pushed the man's hand away and slipped out of his reach, continually backing up, putting himself again and again between her and the other man. Karen kept the gun raised but didn't pull the trigger.

Her mind was suddenly ablaze with thoughts that wouldn't stop racing, words that wouldn't stop coming, memories of orders and sensations that pounded at the walls of her head and shrieked to be let free.

Eric got a hand on Matt's throat when he took a wrong step in a patch of mud that was too slick and his leg faltered-- _that fucking wound again_ \-- and Eric screeched at his victory, at finally getting a grip on his prey. With a sharp bark in response, Matt grabbed his hand and twisted it and shoved it down and behind and something _cracked_ like a log in a fire. Eric went down in the mud again, howling, wrist bent in an unnatural angle as Matt stood over him.

"Go away," he snarled again, and it rattled in Karen's throat like a drummer's crescendo.

"Fuckin' _kill you,_ " Eric shouted from the ground, garbled, the only words that had come out of his mouth since all of this had started. He rolled onto his unhurt arm, his left one, trying to get up, but Matt's foot slammed into his neck and forced him right back down into the mud.

"Not yours. Go away." Matt's words, broken and halting, were a warning, a promise, a dull finality, eked out between bared teeth that flashed white in the growing dark of the night and the clouds behind them. " _Go_."

"Kill you, kill you, kill you..."

A freezing wash of understanding suddenly coursed through Karen's body: Matt was giving Eric a chance to get away. A chance to live. _Matt did not want to kill him._

Eric tried to get up again. _Killyoukillyoukillyou._

Beneath that eternal engine-growl, Matt huffed out a sigh, pained and furious, then bent down and grabbed him by a handful of his hair. Eric swung wildly at him, catching him in the cheek and ear, but Matt didn't seem to notice or care. He dug the fingers of his free hand into the other man's jaw, and his expression was distorted, rage and anger and something else--

One single, terminal movement, and Matt twisted Eric's head and broke his neck.

The final high yelp from Eric's throat and the noise of snapping bone echoed back through the woods and into Karen's ears like gunfire. She watched Matt straighten up, still growling and panting, as hot and forceful as a vehicle's engine. He dumped Eric's body on the ground like garbage, blood and mucus spilling from the corpse's mouth and nose in a slowing torrent of red and white.

Matt's head tilted, and he turned toward her. His left hand drummed wildly against nothing at his side. "Karen." Her name, stumbling out like two words rather than one, was fire, rumbling out from under the growl. "Okay? Safe?" He dragged in a heavy breath and took a step in her direction.

Her body was a sudden surge of movement, all reflex and instinct, moved only by the need to keep the animal from touching her, from doing to her what it just did to Eric. She came to life all at once and so quickly that she could only let it carry her automatically.

She lifted the tranquilizer gun and fired it.

Matt jerked as if to get out of its way, like he'd done so many times before when she'd put him under the barrel of her gun, but his leg fought against the movement, half-buckling, and the dart landed. It went in. She couldn't stop it. His left shoulder, just above his collarbone.

Karen wanted to vomit but couldn't do anything past the shriek in her head.

_Wrong, wrong, wrong, this is all wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong--_

Matt stuttered to a halt, twitching, dazed, reaching up with his good hand to touch the dart. All of the tight and twisted fury that had come onto his face fell away when he realized what it was, fingers fumbling over the thin tube before pulling it out. The end of the needle glinted, a tiny white line cutting through the murky shadows of the trees.

He straightened up shakily and dropped the dart into the mud beneath him, and she wished it was the tremor that had caused him to lose his grip. Confusion spread across his face as he lifted his head in her direction, followed by something she wished she couldn't see in the half-light of the dying day: betrayal, and a hurt that dug too deep for either of them to understand.

"...Karen, why?"

She couldn't say anything. She couldn't take it back. She couldn't get the drugs back out of him. She didn't know what to do.

"Why?" he asked again, taking a step toward her, but everything in him stopped halfway through the movement and he stumbled. He shook his head jerkily as if to toss off the sedative that was seeping into it, spreading through his body like a flash-fire, but it didn't work, and he made a low noise, confusion and fear. He knew what was happening.

He attempted, "Kar--...Ka..." but his voice died, his feet tripped on nothing but air, and he collapsed, a tangled pile in the half-frozen mud. He made a strange gurgling whine, trying halfheartedly to curl up into a defensive position, but he only made it halfway before shuddering to a stop.

The drugs had taken effect so quickly that, for one short moment, she thought she'd killed him. She thought she'd given him a fatal dosage and stopped his heart with it. But no, as she approached, breathing in harsh and uneven gasps, she could see his chest moving in an opposite fashion-- gentle, slowing. Karen nudged him with her foot and he didn't respond. She bent down hesitantly and snapped her fingers in front of his face, in front of his fixed, half-hooded eyes. Nothing.

She lifted her head. Eric lay twisted and unmoving on the ground a few feet away. His chest wasn't shifting at all. The blood coming from him was starting to slow. She pawed at her face and felt white-hot fury at the tears that came away on her skin.

Frank. _Foggy_. She had to get Foggy. He would know what to do. He would hate her for what she'd done, but that was okay, he hated her anyway.

Karen reached out, slow and careful, shaking Matt's shoulder, to be sure he wasn't going to get up, that he wasn't pretending just for a chance to leap up and snap her neck, too. He didn't do anything but continue huffing, slow and sedated, into the mud. His left hand, half-curled with his palm upward, continued to tremble. Not even the drugs could get it to stop.

"Fuck," she heard herself hiss. She wasn't sure that even Matt would be that good of an actor. Chewing on her tongue to stop a groan of disgust from spilling out her throat, she bent over and grabbed a bit of his sweater. His fingers scratched weakly into the dirt for a moment at being handled, but then he went limp again.

She tugged at him until he at least wasn't breathing into the ground. Karen tried not to think about how little he weighed as she shifted him, or how his breathing snorted reflexively at the movement in his body as she shoved one of his arms under his head to stop his face from tilting down. She got to her feet and backed up, shaking her hands as if it would remove the fact she'd touched him.

He didn't move. A crumpled and broken thing laying discarded in the mud.

Foggy was going to fucking _kill her._

Karen pushed a hand down her face, then moved over to Eric and took the pistol from him. She  checked the chamber-- loaded-- and paused before turning back to the shelter.

She could do it right now. She could cock the pistol and stick the barrel against Matt's forehead and pull the trigger while he lay there. He wouldn't suffer and he wouldn't even know. It'd be so fast, so easy. She could even blame it on Eric, although she'd have to come up with a decent explanation for why his neck was snapped.

_He killed Eric and came after me, so I shot him._

No, that wouldn't work, because Foggy wouldn't believe for a minute that Matt had attacked her. Karen felt sick when she realized that it was probably true. All those stumbling repetitions of ' _Won't hurt you'_ s played back through her head. Foggy would never fall for it. Karen wouldn't, either, because, God, _because--_

Because Matt was the only reason that Eric hadn't torn her throat out and eaten her alive. He was the only reason she wasn't dead right now. Her past life had repeated itself and that blind son-of-a-bitch had saved her. Again.

He'd saved her, and she'd never even given him reason to.

Karen pushed the heel of her thumb against her forehead, feeling the cool metal of the pistol brush against her skin. She sighed, and took a step toward him--

A high-pitched wailing cut through the air, startling her into a standstill. A familiar sound, one that ran ice through her veins and into her limbs and brain. It pitched up higher, a deafening chitter-- too-fast beeping, car doors and old alarm clocks and Morse code. It was coming from the shelter.

There was more than one of them.

"Shit," she breathed, and started running.

 _They're coming,_ Jack had said. They were here.

She had to get to the shelter-- to the courtyard. She had to get into the light. Karen took off at a flat sprint, heaving for breath, but she was faster than most, and reached the gate just as another undulating shriek exploded through the air. North. They weren't too far away.

Karen felt her breathing become a little easier as she passed into the glow of the spotlights. She wasn't safe, not yet, but the light would give her a little more time to get inside and-- and, God, she didn't know what to do. Hunker down, stay quiet, and hoped they moved on, away from the light that they hated so goddamn much. The spotlights had saved them before.

Halfway across the courtyard, there was a squeal, much closer than the others, and a sharp _bang_ , and--

The lights went out.

She stumbled as the darkness blanketed her, heart rocketing even further up her throat. The generator. They'd taken out the generator. They'd tired of slinking around the halo of light they used as a shield, and took it away.

Karen had no other choice-- she ran. As fast as she could, crossing the courtyard and stumbling into the garage before slamming the sliding door behind her. Past Eric's truck, still warm from its journey to the bridge, where Jack had been wounded, but not from a feral-- an alien. A scout, she bet.

She got to the door, and shoved it open. The hall was empty. Karen let out a breath and started toward her room. Her rifle. A light was bouncing around the corner of the hall, a flashlight, and she moved toward it, fumbling her hand against the wall to stop herself from running into it.

Frank came around the corner, pale, shaken, flashlight in one hand, his rifle in the other. He saw her and immediately jumped her shit.

"Where is he?"

God, he knew. Of course he knew. Karen could already tell what had happened for him. The aliens had started shrieking, and he went to his room to keep his friend safe, and his friend was gone. Because his friend had gotten out in order to _save her._

She couldn't say anything. Everything was rushing, a maelstrom, inside of her.

He pressed in close, breathing hard, panicked. She'd never seen such fear in her life. His eyes were wet and his skin was so, so white. His voice shook as he spoke. "Karen, what did you _do?"_

She didn't want to tell him. All she wanted was to run, far fucking away, she wanted to leave him and his stupid fucking best friend and the shelter and the goddamned aliens behind. She didn't want to be here any more. Physically, mentally. She wanted _out._

Karen raised a hand in defense, realized she would not be able to do anything against the rage she was going to receive when she told him, and dropped it. Her head hung on her shoulders and she spoke as clear and concise as possible:

"I shot him."

Frank stiffened all over. His limbs, his face, everything. All that really moved was his chest, in a rapid pant, and the flashlight, shivering back and forth. His jaw moved for a long moment before he finally spat out a word.

_"What?!"_

She raised her hands. He was going to kill her. She'd known this from the second she put that dart into his friend. Karen's mind stumbled over her own thoughts. He thought she'd put a _bullet_ in Matt. No, no, that was wrong. "With a tranquilizer! Fo--"

Frank repeated himself. It was far more dangerous. _"What?!"_   How could a tranquilizer be worse than a bullet? He was about to attack her, she knew it, and she felt herself stiffen all over for the blow he was going to fire at her. It didn't happen. He spoke in a growl instead, low and dark and an echo of the animal that had just saved her life. "Karen, where the _fuck_ is he?!"

She tried to speak, to explain herself. Her tongue fought her. "He's--he's out in the Park--"

"--With the fucking aliens?!"

Jesus Christ, yes. Did they eat things that were still breathing? Was he being torn apart right now, while she stammered and tried to defend herself? There was no defense from this. Everything within her was whirling, whirling, cold and dark and _numbing_ but she didn't _want_ to be numb, she didn't _want_ it. She wanted to hate herself as much as Frank did.

"I couldn't-- I didn't--"

Frank turned on her. She'd never seen such fury, not even within the expression on a feral. Karen backed away, hit a wall. He was shouting at her. "Didn't _what?!_   How did you get him out there, Karen? What did you--"

The hallway rumbled with them inside it. Above her, she heard noises, thumping, heavy feet on a metal roof, one, two, three, four, five. She couldn't breathe. There was a crash, from far away.  A scream. Deborah. One of them had gotten inside.

Frank lurched forward and snatched her by the arm. His fingers were like steel. She never knew this man could be so goddamn strong. It hurt, but she knew she deserved it. "Take me to him," Frank ordered, shoving his flashlight into her hand. _"Now._ "

She tried to talk. She tried to tell him, _'They're out there, and the second we leave, we're as dead as Matt is right now.'_ Nothing came out of her throat because it closed of its own accord.

" _Now_ , Karen!"

Her mind raced, and raced. They couldn't go outside, they couldn't go into the dark. It was suicide. But if she couldn't save Matt, she could at least save his other half. Karen turned toward the garage, trusting Frank to follow-- and he did. It was strange, she thought, sluggishly, in the back of her head, that it was the first thing she'd ever trusted him with.

He didn't reciprocate. "That's not the way out," he barked.

"We're not leaving out the back," she said, breathless. "We're taking Eric's truck."

Frank let out a hard scoff. "Yeah, because a moving truck is really fucking inconspicuous when we have those things fucking running around out there!" His voice was cracking. He was terrified. She could feel it in him more than she could feel it in herself. She felt nothing in herself besides the empty maelstrom that only brought that hollow numbness.

Karen shook her head, tossed a glance at him over her shoulder. "Spotlights, Foggy."

"Don't you call me that. You don't get to fucking call me that." His feet were pounding on the floor as he caught up with her, overtook her. "Faster. If he dies, it's on you."

 _He's dead already_ , she tried to say. "Then come on," she said, and sped up, turning the corner to the garage.

A shriek blasted through the hallway. Close. Right above them.

There was a popping noise, another squeal like two pieces of metal rubbing against each other, and then the ceiling collapsed down the end of the hall. She saw mercurial silver, heard that high beeping chitter. Frank grabbed her before she could do anything else, yanking her through the door to the garage, slamming it shut behind him. The alien roared; they both flinched.

Out of time.

"Keys?"

"Glove compartment." They moved at the same time, him scrambling into the driver's seat, her rushing to follow into the passenger side. Frank found them and jammed them into the ignition; the truck roared obediently to life and she heard the shrieking reply of the alien inside the shelter. The garage door was still shut.

"Haven't driven for a while," Frank breathed, voice strangled, afraid. "Thank fuck this is an automatic." There was no humor to be found in his words, no matter how hard he was trying to force it into them.

He revved the engine and the truck leapt forward and charged straight through the garage door, knocking it off its track, sending it spinning to the side. He slammed the gas. The truck fishtailed in the muddy grass outside the garage, through the courtyard, but kept moving.

"The fence is closed," she said, and knew already that it didn't matter.

He shifted gear and the truck plowed through it, sending pieces of chain and padlock flying through the pale scope of the headlights. The chainlink squealed as it grated over the hood and windshield; something caught on the top of the truck and snapped.

Behind them was the roaring, the chittering. Stomping. It was coming. It was right on their fucking ass. She heard Frank's breath hitch, and got a glance at him, lit by the dashboard. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were wide, watery. She wished she felt like he did. She wished she could feel like it mattered if she died right here and now.

"Where is he?"

Karen swung her head out to look. Behind them, the noise behind them grew closer, so high and loud. Eric had taken her in this direction, and they'd gone off the trail, but not far. It was so dark. "That side-road, there. Quarter-mile out." She prayed and prayed and prayed that she was giving him the right directions.

The half-beep-half-chitter-all-roar pierced the air again. Closer. "Hold on," she said, leaning toward the dashboard and shoving open the sunroof at the same time.

"What the fuck are you doing?!"

"Shut up," Karen whispered, finding the spotlight controls on the dash and switching them on. She climbed up on the seat and raised herself out of the truck, grabbing the spotlight and swinging it around. The alien was churning after them, kicking up mud and dead grass, that awful noise shrieking through the air-- oh God, Jesus, it was an adult, it wasn't a fucking juvenile, it was fully-grown, nearly the size of a goddamn semi, body plates glinting in the moonlight.

This wasn't just an attack.  This was a hunt.  A slaughter.

Karen grabbed the spotlight's cover and yanked it open all the way, twisting around, blasting the light toward the son of a bitch as it leapt.

It squealed-- _pain_ \-- and its movements shuddered, and it backed away, mercury and silver, hissing defensively. She kept the light trained on it, shifting her feet in the seat of the truck, feeling her eyes tearing in the icy November air.

Frank shouted at her, but she couldn't hear him, all she could hear was the sound those damn things were making, all around her-- there were too many-- where the fuck had they come from? Why now? Why all at once? Why--?

Something slammed into her from behind. It burned like fire across her shoulderblades and she went face-first into the roof with lights popping in her eyes, scrabbling for purchase, fumbling to get the light back in her hands. Karen turned it and lit up another one-- a juvenile-- as it clambered up the hood of the truck and came at her. It shrieked in pain and shock and scratched furrows in the roof as it leapt away.

She blew out a breath and went hunting for the adult, but her shoulder and neck hurt so bad, and everything was suddenly _so warm_ down her back, hot and wet and sticky like she was sweating even though it was the dead of night. Frank was yelling again, but she couldn't hear him, couldn't make out the words.

"The light," she said, trying to explain, and she was surprised to find blood dripping from her mouth and onto the truck. Karen reached up to touch it, blinking in bewilderment. The truck jerked to a stop beneath her and she slumped against the sunroof, suddenly dizzy and suddenly very, very tired. She tried to keep her grip on the spotlight but it slipped out of her hands. Everything did.

Karen blinked heavily and then she was inside the truck, twisted up between the glove compartment and the seat, and it _hurt_. She opened her mouth to call for help, but only spat out more blood. Where was Frank? She couldn't see him. The driver's side door was open. An alien must have got him, she thought.

"Sorry I shot him," she mumbled around the blood in her mouth. "I didn't mean to."

Something was shouting on the very edge of her hearing, she realized, far too late. A hand touched her throat. The fingers were cold. She thought she heard her name, her real name, but once the voice went quiet she forgot what they'd been saying in the first place. The spotlight was still burning, at least, she could just barely see it out the windshield, but then those freezing fingers were on her face, and something passed in front of the light, and everything drew down into one weak glowing point before folding up into itself and dying away.


	11. end transmission (side: foggy)

Getting comfortable on a cot that was barely big enough for one person was fucking impossible when Matt came into the equation. Foggy tried all kinds of different positions to avoid waking up stiff and sore. The guy was a clingy fucking asshole in his sleep. That was something Foggy thought might have been burned out of him, but no, it only got _worse._

He slept on his back, and Matt used him as a goddamn second mattress, pushing his face up under Foggy's chin. He slept on his stomach and blam, a hundred-twenty pounds of fucking feral right between his shoulders. On his side, and Matt jammed himself between Foggy and the wall the cot was against, which was actually the most comfortable, until Matt decided he needed more room. Which was fucking _always._

Foggy eventually decided that the 'Stay-On-My-Side-So-There's-Less-Elbows-In-My-Fucking-Face' position was the most comfortable, and Matt seemed okay with that. He kept pushing his face between Foggy's shoulders though, and goddammit, it was just impossible to not get drooled on.

But Foggy slept, and didn't dream of the roof, or the fire, or the night the sky opened up. His dreams were empty and dark and cold. He wasn't sure Matt dreamed at all, because Matt only got up when he heard something outside.

Which was also _fucking always._

Foggy was jolted awake, once again, by Matt's harsh growling as he caught the noise of something far in the distance. The rumble coming from his friend's throat-- although really, at this proximity, it was like it was coming directly from his _heart_ \-- translated into a strange sensation that rattled in Foggy's trachea as Matt sluggishly lifted himself up, canting his head around to focus.

"Stop that, Matty. I'm trying to sleep."

His response was a hard, warm huff against the skin at the back of his neck. Foggy felt his eyes rolling before opening them. It was a lot brighter in their room than he'd expected. Early morning, just around dawn. The light that came in through the window was a pale, washed-out green. Ugh. He could have at least gotten another hour if not for his stupid hypervigilant alarm clock.

Also, Matt was still growling.

Foggy let out a long sigh and reached around to slap his friend's shoulder, halfway between gentle and forceful, because he was halfway between sleep and irritation. Matt was already sitting up, so he ended up bumping his hand weakly into his friend's chest. "Knock it off."

Instead of going quiet and calming the fuck down like last time, Matt surged upright, vaulting over Foggy and off of the cot. He nearly crashed when his bad leg hit the floor-- _his fucking stitches, the asshole, he's going to tear them out_ \-- and made a rough noise of pain. He lurched to the window, slamming his hands into it, then scratched around the frame to try to get it open.

Foggy, tangled in a hundred thousand goddamn blankets, nearly fell on his face when he climbed out after him, hissing. "Shh! No, no, Matt, no, don't do that." He tugged on one of Matt's arms, but Matt yanked himself out of Foggy's reach and continued scrabbling at the windowframe, whining desperately, possessed by actions that he couldn't stop doing.

"Matt, stop, you gotta stop, you can't go out there."

"Hear," he whimpered, "hear. I hear. I hear. Foggy." Matt couldn't find the latch, because the latch didn't exist. The window was sealed.

"Jesus! Matt!" Foggy felt the anger in his own voice, his back stiff from his stupid fucking sleeping position and damp all over his shoulders from the fucking drool and he had _just wanted another twenty goddamn minutes of sleep, why was that so much to fucking ask?_ "Matt, _stop it_ ," he ground out, and he could feel the fury in the word that should have never, ever been there.

The tone of Foggy's voice slowed Matt to frozen, frightened stillness. He stopped looking for the latch, but continued panting against the glass, blowing up ghostly patches of moisture. His eyebrows were furrowed in a frown. "Foggy," he mumbled. There was still a whine in the back of his throat that he couldn't quite talk around. "Hear them."

"Hear _what_ , man? Get away from the fucking window."

Matt flinched, then did as asked, bowing his head, stiff all over as he backed away from the glass. He fell quiet. His left arm shook, but he didn't move otherwise, eyes to the floor with that horrible sad stillness on his face as if he was anticipating violence against him. Because he was. Which was just fucking perfect.

"God." Foggy dropped his face into his hands and his dumb ass to the cot, trying to breathe slowly. Jesus Christ. He was scaring the everloving shit out of him. Matt had been scared shitless by his only fucking friend in the entire fucking world. The only person who gave a fuck. _God._

It took a long time for Foggy to talk, because his voice was half-choked with anger and exhaustion and _the worst goddamned feeling in the world_ because he'd turned on his emotionally shattered best friend because of a reflex that his best friend couldn't even fucking help.

And his best friend hadn't even fought back.

"Sorry, Matty," he finally said, rubbing his face.

"...Okay," Matt replied, faintly, running a fingertip along the cuff of his hoodie.

Foggy couldn't look at him, because he didn't want to see that heaviness on Matt's face, but then he puffed out a heavy breath and looked anyway, because he deserved to. God, it hurt.  "I'm sorry," he repeated.

A cold feeling built in him from the bottom of his gut and froze the anger out of him so fiercely that he couldn't even recall what the fuck had been angering him so much in the first goddamn place. God, he was so bad at this.

Yeah, because rehabilitating ferals was a common fucking hobby in this world of theirs. There was _totally_ a pamphlet.

But he spoke again, gently, at Matt's silence and hesitation. "What did you hear, Matty?"

Matt took a moment before he jerked his head in a shake. He didn't know, and Foggy could tell he'd hesitated to admit it, even though it was another thing that he couldn't help.

Foggy pushed his hands down his face, then removed them with another sigh. "Okay, then... let's... figure it out."

"...Figure it out?" Matt spoke weakly and didn't move from his spot, head tilted in the direction of the window. His eyes darted around as if he could see out of it. The outside lights were still on; the glow from them and the rising sun cast itself through the murky glass and shaded his pale skin to a sickly color.

"Yeah, buddy... can you tell me more about what you're hearing?"

"Mm." He frowned, but it was an expression that was easier to take than that frightened acceptance of violence, and flicked his eyes around rapidly as he sought words. His shoulders were relaxing, at least, which meant the anxiety was starting to leave him. Foggy held back his sigh of relief. "Hear. Um. Me."

"What? You heard yourself?"

Matt's jaw jumped and he finally moved, albeit stiffly, pawing around for the computer chair. "No." He sounded empty and exhausted, like he'd gotten even less sleep than Foggy had, and dropped carefully into the chair, backwards, with a soft whuff of a sigh.

"Then what was it?" Foggy pushed his fingers through his hair, straightening it out. He fished around near the cot for where he'd put his hairtie.

"Don'know." Matt pushed himself closer on the chair's uneven wheels, head tilted, then bent and plucked the hairtie up from the floor. It had fallen and become hidden behind one of the legs of the cot. He held it out, still hesitant, and although it was something he should have been proud of, his expression was quiet and solemn. "Foggy."

"Thanks, man. How'd you find that?"

Matt didn't answer. He folded his arms on the chair's headrest and put his chin on them, and that tiny frown played on his face, the one that was so small but still hurt so badly.

"...Hey. What's the matter?" Foggy tied back his hair and then leaned forward, tugging at Matt's sleeve. "Tell me what's wrong." He already knew.

It took Matt a minute to come up with his response. He chewed his tongue awhile before finally mumbling, "Foggy. I'm... not. I'm not... good. Am I?" His eyes were fixed in the direction of the floor. They hadn't come up once during this whole stupid thing. It was funny how he still had that reflex in him, even after going blind and losing most of his damned brain to a virus. To look down, to appear as less of a threat.

Still. "...What makes you think that, Matty?"

"Hear them," he said, then chewed on his bottom lip. "Me. Outside."

Foggy couldn't wrap his head around what Matt was trying to tell him. He tried anyway, because nobody else was ever going to, and he felt a sudden burning pride to be the one to do it. "You heard yourself out there? But you're right here, Matt. You're in my room, with me."

Matt let out a soft breath, then took Foggy's hand-- gentle, always, a ghost of a touch-- and placed it on his left arm. His muscles shuddered inconsistently and uncontrollably beneath the fabric of the hoodie. The tremor. "Me. Foggy."

_Oh._ "A feral?"

"Feral," Matt repeated. "I'm feral." It was not a question.

"Yeah, you are. Is that what you're hearing? The other ferals?"

"Yes." He tried to drop his arm.

Foggy held onto it, because he thought Matt would appreciate the contact. "They aren't like you, Matt. You're different. Remember how I told you, you're different?"

"Yes. Remember." Matt gently tugged his arm back to himself anyway, as if to hide it. He blinked slowly, curling his right leg up on the chair and against his chest. The left probably hurt too much to join him. "Hear them."

"Don't worry. They'll go away."

"Go away?"

"They'll leave, buddy."

"Mm." Matt curled his right arm around his left, like it would hide or erase the tremors. He pushed his chin across the backrest, then blinked a few times, canting his head. His eyes darted around rapidly-- he'd picked up a sound in the periphery of his hearing.

Foggy frowned. He kept his voice low and quiet, and hoped it wasn't the wild bastards outside again. "What do you hear?"

"Um. Kar-Karen."

"In her room?"

"No." Matt was attempting to tuck himself up tighter, but couldn't. He didn't say anything else for another few long moments, until his shoulders dropped marginally and he huffed out a sigh. "No. Karen... mm. Go away."

"She's gone, you mean."

"Yes. G-g-... gone."

She must have walked by the door, Foggy thought. Or had she stopped, considering coming inside? "It's okay." God, he'd frightened Matt with his stupid temper while the poor fucker was still living inside a building that was full of people that wanted him very, very dead. He couldn't be worse at this if he _tried_. "I'll keep you safe."

Matt huddled into his hoodie, and it always made him look so small. "...K-Karen," he mumbled again. He had a lot of trouble with hard consonants, like his vocal cords wanted to make a guttural noise instead of a word and he had to fight to stop them from doing so. Which was most likely the case.

"Hey, don't worry about Karen, Matt. She's not going to hurt you."

"...Wants to."

Foggy felt the frown crumpling the muscles in his face. He kept his voice soft, trying to soothe him. "Matt. I'm not going to let anything happen to you. Do you understand? I won't let her touch you."

His eyes flicked back and forth, once. "Remember. Foggy."

"Remember what, buddy?"

Matt's eyes lifted upward, downward, near the cot, back down to the floor. He shifted himself a few inches with his left leg. The lines of his forehead creased. He was looking for something. Looking _hard_. "Karen..." he let out a breath, blinked heavily, eyebrows tightening, "...off... office?" He posed it as a question, as if he wasn't sure if it was really a word or not.

Foggy certainly hadn't taught it to him. He felt his stomach roll with a strange mix of ten different emotions. _Office._ Matt had found a memory, one that he should have lost, somewhere in his head. Where? How? "You remember the office, Matty?"

He let out a heavier breath, frustration. "Don't know."

"You remember the word?"

"...Yes."

"Anything else, Matt? Do you see anything?"

It took him a long, winding minute to filter through his head, but eventually, and predictably, his answer: "...No." Another huff. There was a fragment, somewhere in there, and he'd found it, but he couldn't find anything else. Foggy could only imagine how that felt. One single scrap of a life half-lived, without any other pieces of reference. Not an image, because Matt didn't see images. A feeling. A memory of sound or smell. How confusing was that?

"Do you remember Karen? From the office?"

"...Don't know." He rolled his eyes, then closed them, visibly exhausted of the battle he was fighting in his own mutilated fucking brain. No wonder he slept so much.

Foggy chewed on his tongue. "She used to work with us, Matt. Before..." he swallowed his anxiety, afraid of confusing his friend, but he reached across the space and fished Matt's arm out from against his chest, rolling the ball of his thumb against the shivering muscles. "Before this, Matty."

Matt clenched his fist. It didn't stop the tremor. It never had, even before it became permanent. His eyes were fixed on the floor again. "I... took," he mumbled, then pressed his lips together, thinking, trying to chain together the words he had into something coherent, something Foggy could understand. "Ferals took."

"The virus, Matt."

"V..." Shit, 'v' sounds, that was really fucking hard for him. It came out awkward, shortened. "Virus?"

"They make you sick. You got sick with one. It did that to you." Scrubbed out his memories. Burned them out of him. Tore them out of his head and threw them away. Matt was just sifting through the ashes now. They both were. And Matt was tiring of the struggle. "The virus did this to you." Foggy rocked Matt's trembling arm again.

"Mm." He thought for a long time, but in the end, only came up with a soft, painful, bewildered, "Why?"

God. "That's... that's what it does. But, Matty. You remembered me." Foggy could never tell him that all of this had happened because he'd gotten bitten trying to protect him. A faded memory of sobbing while watching Matt clean out the bite wound, alone, hovered in the back of his head. "You remembered me, and you found me."

Matt flicked his eyes around Foggy's face. "Yes." He blinked slowly. "I want," he mumbled. "I want... I want..." he didn't know the word for it. His jaw jumped. "I want me."

"You already have that," Foggy said, trying to smile. It burned across his face.

"Where?" Like he was a physical object that could be collected and put back together, like a puzzle or a broken vase.

"Everywhere, Matt." He squeezed his friend's arm. "You're all here. I promise." Just rearranged. Parts of him hidden away in corners, in his head. Hidden, not gone. "And Matty, you're good. Don't ever say you aren't. You're all good."

"All?"

"Oh, yeah. Even this," he waggled Matt's arm a little. "You're more good than I am."

Matt's eyebrows crumpled; a bewildered little smile played at his lips. "Foggy, no."

"Yes. So stop worrying about Karen. Stop worrying about the ferals outside. Worry about _yourself_ , for once."

He reached up with his other hand and scratched his chin. "Yourself? Foggy. Me?"

Foggy let out a soft laugh. Soft, but genuine. "See, that, right there, where you don't think about yourself, and only everyone else? That's what you do. That's what you always fucking did. Even before this."

Matt shifted his shaking arm. "Before this?"

"Yeah. It got really annoying, actually. You got yourself in a lot of deep shit because you didn't give a crap about yourself." Foggy sighed, then paused a moment before he reached up and pushed Matt's hair down, noticing for the first time how much he looked like he was about to go to a really bad grunge concert. "There's no part of you that's gone, Matt. It's all right there."

A tiny smile flashed across his friend's face at his words, then widened at the gentle contact in his hair. Foggy reveled in it.

"Nothing's missing, buddy. Just misplaced. You'll find it. And if you can't, you know I'll be here to help you." He grabbed the chair and rolled Matt closer to untangle a bigger knot. Maybe _he_ should be the one with the fucking hairtie. "Hold still. You need a haircut, man."

"Haircut, what is this?"

"It's where you let me chop off some of this," he said, gently grabbing a handful of his friend's hair before pushing it down against his scalp. It was still soft, even after being caked in mud over and over again. He pushed his fingers through it the best he could, trying to get it to settle a little more naturally.

Matt had his eyes screwed shut, and his nose wrinkled, but his lips were smiling. He was enjoying it.

Foggy took a little longer than needed, just to help wipe that tired, broken expression off of his friend's face. He didn't want to see it. It hurt too goddamn much. "There. Better."

"I want," Matt said, eyes opening back up, flicking around near Foggy's knee. He reached up with both hands. "Foggy, I want to."

He bent his head. Matt fucked with his hair-- fiddling with the hairtie, running strands through his fingers, fascinated-- for fifteen minutes. It may have gone on longer, but Foggy's back started to cramp.

"Feels. Feels soft."

"Yeah, it's my amazing genetics."

"Genetics, what is this?"

"...You know what, I didn't mean genetics, I meant hair. It's my amazing hair."

\---

They were leaving.

Foggy had decided the night before. Right after seeing Eric's arm shaking and receiving a death threat for his silence. They were getting the hell outta Dodge. As quickly and quietly as they could. If everything went according to how he was planning it, they'd be gone by tomorrow morning. He intended on taking Deborah's truck, when Jack returned with it. Stealing it, was the actual term, he knew.

He'd never really stolen anything before. Not something that was owned by someone still alive and breathing. Matt might have, but he wasn't sure, and he knew he couldn't ask anymore.

Stealing a vehicle and medical supplies was dangerous, yes, but keeping Matt in the shelter was fucking _suicide_. And he couldn't keep Matt in danger. It was like keeping himself in danger. It _was_ keeping himself in danger.

And he couldn't tell Matt ahead of time, either. He didn't want to freak him out again.

A voice in his head tried to tell him something about all of this being _us or them_ , but he smothered it with a sigh as he entered the silent, empty infirmary and shut the door behind him.

He hadn't seen Eric at all that morning, and tried not to let the worry churn too hard in his stomach when he didn't see Karen, either. Foggy spent the morning quietly inside the infirmary, going through the inventory and setting aside all the extra medications and supplies. Stuff that wouldn't be too badly missed. Most of these people didn't even know what some of it _was._

Food and water were a whole other can of worms he'd yet to open. He would have Matt, and Matt could find that sort of stuff. God, he was going to miss the water purifier. Showers were nice, but Matt's safety was far more important. He'd deal with the smell, and Matt would too; they'd already gone through all that, anyway.

His mind kept turning back to Karen. He wanted to invite her along. He wanted to take her from this stupid fucking place, from the mud, from _Eric_ , but he knew she wouldn't go. She would stay here until she self-destructed. Or until Eric went into the late-stage of the virus and attacked her.

And Karen was _sleeping_ with Eric. Foggy still didn't know if the virus was spread through sexual contact. But again, he'd spent the entirety of Matt's progress through this bullshit cuddling up with the guy and getting drooled on every goddamn night, and never contracted it. So, either Matt wasn't contagious, or Foggy was immune, or Matt actually _would_ have to bite him to transmit it-- which had never happened.

But God, the last thing he wanted was _two_ friends struggling through that shit.

Would Karen survive it, like Matt had? Foggy felt a cold and nauseating hope-- he hoped that if she had it already, that it would kill her, because it was hard enough to watch Matt's constant, permanent struggle with his own voice and his own body. But Karen, too? He couldn't think of anything more painful. Okay, maybe fire. Or acid.

And, well, he _knew_ Matt. He knew so much about him that putting the little prick back together again wasn't the most difficult task in the world. Karen, though-- he didn't know _shit_ about her. Especially not now. She was a locked door in front of a hallway composed entirely of locked doors.

Maybe he could find the keys.

\---

"You wouldn't understand, even if I told you."

Foggy shut the door with more force than necessary, a repeat of how she'd left his room the other day. He let out a massive breath and paused to rub his face before continuing to the kitchen.

Jack had come in to get his stitches removed, and Karen popped in just as he was finishing up.

They'd fought, and he'd tried to tell her about Eric, but the words wouldn't come out. He ended up awkwardly hinting it, and she didn't catch it. Of course she wouldn't. Her knowledge of emotions was just as limited as Matt's.

And he'd told her so, because she _did_ remind him of his friend. A total inability to understand why things hurt so much. And there was Foggy, having to watch them both crumbling because of the supports that they no longer had.

He shouldn't have snapped at her, taunted her with all the shit she'd lost. She'd looked so confused; it was visible even under the stiff mask she'd erected over herself. That, or Foggy had been studying her long enough that he could pick out the fragile flickers of emotion that randomly flashed across her face.

He leaned against the wall outside the kitchen and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying not to sigh too loudly. He didn't know what to do. How to get her away from Eric or Eric away from everyone else. His fear was less centered on getting hurt, and more concentrated around being killed himself and leaving Matt alone-- and he knew that thoughts like that should frighten him, but he really didn't care. God, he just wanted a calm place for Matt to heal, to be put back together, and he wasn't going to get it here.

Foggy grabbed some food, then went straight back toward his room. Whispered into the door, as he always did, "Get away from the door, Matty," before unlocking and opening it.

Matt was on the bed, because Foggy had told him to stay there so his stitches didn't get ripped out. They'd come dangerously close when he'd leapt out of the cot. He was still so rattled from Foggy's outburst in the morning that he'd rushed to comply. Matt still lifted himself up when Foggy came in, carefully pulling the headphones off of his ears, fumbling around the side of the CD player to shut it off.

"Hey, buddy," Foggy mumbled, locking the door.

"Foggy."

"I got you food."

Matt _did_ perk up at the mention of food, pushing himself up the rest of the way, face twisting for a split-second in pain. He got into a sitting position and gathered up the CD player, placing it gently aside. It was the only object he owned, Foggy realized belatedly. He treated it with such reverence.

"Here. Eat it slowly," Foggy said, holding out the Styrofoam cup.

Matt didn't go for it. He didn't get up, either, because Foggy had told him to stay on the bed, but he waggled his good hand in an awkward parody of a 'get over here' motion. Imitation, eked out from the veil of sound and vibration through which he saw the world. "Foggy. Want, want."

Oh, right, he should have known. "Say it right."

Impatient, "I want. Foggy."

Close enough. He bent down and Matt dug his fingers into the hair at the base of Foggy's neck, pulling him in for his gentle little forehead bump. It made a grin splash across Matt's face, and his taut and worried muscles to relax, because it meant everything was okay, if just for those few short seconds.

When Matt pulled his hand back down, Foggy put the noodles in it.

"Foggy, thank you," he murmured, but didn't specify what he was thanking him for. Both, probably. There was a fork in the cup, and Matt ran his fingers along it, frowning.

"It's a fork, so you don't have to eat with your fingers." Foggy sat back on the chair and waited to see if Matt remembered. It would be another muscle memory, he thought.

"Hn." Matt pulled it out, twirling it between his thumb and forefinger. "Fork," he echoed, then dug the tines into the noodles and started eating.

Foggy felt himself grin. Yeah, muscle memory. There were a lot of things that could be reclaimed from that, things that branched out from it. Bridges that could be rebuilt on top of them. "How's your leg?"

"Mm." Matt's mouth was stuffed with noodles, and he swallowed before talking. Did he remember to do that, or had he picked it up off of Foggy? "Okay. Not, um, warm."

Not warm. Good. "Does it hurt bad?"

"Itchy."

"It'll be itchy until I get the stitches out."

"Hn." Matt took another bite, swallowed, and handed Foggy the other half of the cup. He always shared. "Get the stitches out," he repeated, but also somehow demanded.

"Ha! Not for a few days, asshole." The noodles were gross and salty. Bottom of the barrel, for sure. What did these guys eat when they ran out of this shit? Well, it didn't really matter, because Foggy planned to be gone before that happened. "No running around until then, okay?"

Matt flopped over sideways on the cot and grumbled.

"Don't pout."

"Pout, what is this?"

"You're doing it right now."

"Not."

"'Ey. Say it _right_ , man."

Matt groaned dramatically, like he'd just been given a death sentence. " _I'm_ not."

"Thank you. Big baby." Biggest, deadliest, most feral baby.

"I'm not."

"You are. Possessives, Matty. You keep forgetting about them." Or he just skipped them, because he knew Foggy would understand, and dredging up words was never easy, no matter what word it was. Except, apparently, _'Foggy'_ , _'What is this'_ , and _'Yes'._ Those were always clear.

Foggy tried to remember what they'd called that. Brain damage centered around speech difficulties. He was sure he'd seen it on TV, back in his previous life, on that show about the asshole doctor. Comprehension of words spoken to him, but an inability to accurately convey whatever he wanted to speak back.

What the fuck had that show been?

While he was thinking about it, Matt flopped over on his back and fell asleep.

\---

Foggy stayed in his room until the evening, knowing most everyone was gone, and he still didn't know what the fuck to say to Karen, so avoiding her became a priority. Tonight, maybe, he'd talk to her. Before he left with Matt.

He was leafing through one of his medical books with his feet on the cot. Matt was using his shins as a pillow while listening to Vivaldi and folding patterns out of a piece of paper Foggy had ripped from the book. It was quiet and comfortable. He loved this stupid shit.

The lantern was on, set up on the table next to his rifle. It was getting cloudy outside. He tried not to worry about what that meant. A storm, his experience told him, but they hadn't had one in ages. It was cold enough that it might turn into snow, and he hadn't seen snow since the world died. Would it be poisoned, like the rain?

He opened his mouth to say something to Matt about it, but there was a heavy pounding at his door that made the words die suddenly in his throat. He jerked upright, nearly flinging the book into the wall. Matt scrabbled at the blankets, yanking the headphones off, moving to try to hide even though there wasn't anywhere for him to go.

Someone screamed through the door.

"Frank!" It was Deborah. She sounded terrified, hysterical. Oh, God. "Frank, it's Jack, he got-- he-- Frank, you gotta come! _Frank!"_

Foggy got to his feet, tossing the book down on the cot. "Stay here, Matty. Don't move. I'll be right back, okay?" He gave his friend a shaky pat on the shoulder before moving to the door, opening it carefully-- thank God the door was at an angle where Deborah couldn't see the bed-- and slipping out into the hall.

Her face was full of tears and smeared with blood. She was hyperventilating.

He knew immediately what to do. "Show me."

\---

Foggy heaved for breath with his forehead settled against Jack's cooling skin.

If only he'd been faster. If only he'd been better at this. He wasn't a fucking doctor at all. He was a defense attorney scrabbling for life with skills that he wasn't ever meant to have. Useless fucking idiot.

Brian was sobbing. Loud and high. He resisted the urge to tell him to shut up again.

Jesus Christ, he'd just been talking to Jack this morning. They'd been _joking around_. Jack had given him that goddamn whistle and that easy, youthful smile and left with a wave. And the body underneath him, so fucking still, and silent, and growing colder-- that was the kid that he'd just talked to this morning.

God, it wasn't fair.

_We don't live in a world that's fair. We live in this one._

A voice that he missed so fucking much, but was still with him, broken in half, shattered, completely different. He still remembered. Somebody had to _remember._

"I'm so sorry, Brian," Foggy whispered, lifting his head from the corpse underneath him. Brian was sitting on the floor, sobbing, face pale and splashed with blood. It reminded Foggy of himself, in all those days Matt had come home nearly dead and he'd been so, so sure it would be the last time it ever happened. He'd cried so much, and so often, and Matt would always give him that weak smile, even through all that blood and all that pain, and tell him it was going to be okay.

Foggy did not tell Brian that it was going to be okay.

He lifted himself up off of the table and the body-- his shoulders and arms felt so fucking heavy-- and stared down at it. Twisted and torn apart. Eviscerated. He could see burns along the edges of the wounds.

Aliens, then. They must have been at the bridge when Jack went out to scavenge. A trap, most likely. It'd been a boat, hadn't it? Could aliens swim? Did it fucking matter?

Deborah was talking, and it took Foggy a long minute to lift his head and look at her, focus on her face, then her lips, and then the words coming out of them.

He'd missed everything she said. "...What?"

"I said, thank you." Her voice shivered out of her. She was still holding the IV bag.

Foggy shook his head, looked back at Jack's body. "Don't say that. I didn't..." he reached out and settled Jack a little more onto the table, so that he didn't look so goddamned unnatural, laying there all ripped apart. There was terror fixed on his face, permanent. Foggy reached over and shut his eyes. It barely helped. "I didn't do anything, Deborah, so don't thank me."

"You tried."

"I fucked it up." He went about removing the IV, detaching the line, carefully rolling it up as he walked the few short steps to Deborah to take the bag from her. "I've..." he held the bag against his chest, just as she had, "...I never... lost anyone. Before."

"Lucky."

"No." Foggy shook his head and put the bag in the sink. He turned the tap on and rinsed the blood off of his hands. "Inexperienced."

"You know more than any of us."

"And it wasn't enough, was it?" He leaned against the edge of the counter, thinking he might be about to vomit up his lunch into the sink. He didn't. Instead, he spent a moment to take a few deep breaths, and turned back to Deborah, to the body, to Brian a hysterical mess on the floor.

Deborah didn't answer him. He didn't think anyone could.

Foggy made his way over to Brian and crouched next to him, reaching out a careful hand. He was about the same age as Jack, and they were always together. Something was trying to connect in his brain, to tell him that they weren't actually cousins and that Jack had been lying this whole time, but it didn't matter. He settled his hand on Brian's shoulder, and the kid flung himself forward and started sobbing into Foggy's neck.

He stiffened, because he wasn't sure what the hell to do-- he'd never been hugged by someone that wasn't Matt. And Matt had never been-- and still wasn't-- much of a hugger. This kid was a lot bigger, a lot heavier. A lot less damaged.

"Shh, shh," Foggy breathed, placing a hand on the back of Brian's neck, because that had always helped Matt. "It's gonna be okay."

Brian was trying to say something, but it was garbled around his sobbing.

"It's okay," Foggy repeated, dumbly. What else could he fucking say? There wasn't a sequence of words on the planet that could make any of this okay. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," Brian managed. His skin was greasy and warm. He was just a fucking kid. Too young for any of this bullshit to be happening to him.

God, they were all too young for this bullshit. "I know."

Brian stayed there for a while, until his heaving slowed, and his tears weren't coming so rapidly. He pulled away, staring at the ground, face red and puffy. "...Frank, I... I don't want him to go to the burn pile. Please don't make me put him there."

Foggy stretched his stiff neck but resisted the urge to wipe the tears off of his skin. He knew better. "You want to bury him?" he asked, softly, remembering a dusty alleyway and a shard of shrapnel.

"Yeah." The kid's voice was weak, but at least it was there. "Do you think Eric would be okay with it?"

"Fuck what Eric thinks. I'll help you."

"Really?"

"Of course I will." Foggy let out a breath, and got shakily to his feet, then offered a hand to help Brian up. Deborah had wrapped Jack up in a blanket. It had a howling wolf on it. She was sitting on the other table, totally wrecked. They all were.

Brian got up, running a hand over the blanket. He started crying again, but no sobs came out.

"Thanks, Frank."

He let out a breath. "It's... it's Foggy."

The kid looked at him, then, confusion twisting his face up. "What's that?"

"Call me Foggy. That's what my friends call me."

"Nobody calls you Foggy here."

"Well, I didn't have any friends here."

Brian gave him a shaky little smile. God, he was tough. "I guess now you do." He sighed.

"Thank you, Foggy."

"I told you not to thank me."

"I'm doing it anyway."

"...All right." Foggy sighed again, heavily. "I'm going to change my clothes." And check on Matt, who had probably worried his fingernails down to nothing again. Had he heard Jack screaming at all? Could he smell all the blood?

Brian was nodding as he glanced over Foggy's stained shirt. "Oh, your face."

God. Right. Foggy grabbed a rag from the sink and scrubbed it off halfheartedly. "I guess I'm gonna shower, too." He looked over at Deborah, who stared at him and tried a smile, but it crashed and burned. "I'll be back. And, um... I'll do... I'll do better next time." 

There would never be a next time.

\---

Foggy staggered back to his room, half-conscious, pawing at his face, and jammed the key into the lock, barely remembering to mumble, "Get away from the door, buddy." He pushed the door open, and was immediately wide fucking awake.

He noticed, first, how cold it was inside. He noticed, second, that the window was shattered, and his rifle was laying on the floor beneath it. He noticed, third, that Matt was not there. Matt wasn't--

_Matt wasn't in the room._

His heart pounded up, forceful and sudden, in his throat, dancing alongside the hot bile that was trying to leap out of his stomach. His mind whipped around in confused, rapid, repetitive circles. Matt was gone. Matt was gone. _Matt was gone._

Foggy was only able to get to the window and lean halfway out before a shrieking chitter sang through the air outside. He jerked back instinctively, even though the rest of him wanted to climb out and down and _run_ until he found Matt, because who the fuck knew where Matt was, where could he have _possibly gone--_

There was a distant rumble, and a louder shriek, like high-pitched, rapid beeping. God, no. _No_. He could hear more than one of them, more than one voice-- if those abominations of living mercury had anything that could even be considered a voice. More than one. A family. A pack.

What had Jack said?

_They're coming. They're coming._

Panic grabbed him hard and sudden by the throat and held him in place.

It was dark. Nighttime. They were coming, and they were pissed, and there was _more than one of them_ , and _it was dark_ , and--

And Matt was gone. Matt was outside, with them.

Foggy grabbed his bag from the table and his rifle from the floor and tore out of the room, back to the infirmary. Okay, then, _now_. They were leaving _now_. He just had to get those supplies, get a vehicle, find Matt. Easy. Except not at all.

Deborah crashed into him in the hall as he rounded the corner and he barked a noise of shock, while she made a weird choked sound and shook her head. "I gotta get my stuff," she said, because there was no need to tell him that they were about to get fucked sideways. They both knew.

"Where's your truck?" Foggy asked, stepping around her, flinching into himself as another undulating wail divided the sky outside.

"Garage," she responded, breathless, moving past him. "We can't take it, Frank, it doesn't have spotlights, it doesn't-- we wouldn't get far--"

"Okay, okay." He shook his head. "Get your shit, meet me at the infirmary, we'll figure something out." Foggy shoved at her shoulder, aimed her in the rough direction of the hall. "Go!"

Deborah nodded, gave herself a harsh shake, and took off.

Foggy didn't watch her go; he turned and kept moving. He threw the door open to the infirmary and scrambled for the extra shit he'd put aside, then the surgical supplies, the drugs. All of it he piled into a duffel bag. Jack's body was still on the table. Brian wasn't here. Where the fuck was anyone? Where the fuck was _Karen?_

Where the _fuck was Matt?_

He hefted the bag onto his shoulder and threw himself back out into the hall at the same moment that the power went out. As the lights died, he felt every fiber of muscle in his body freeze into sudden icy rigidity. Jesus, God, no, they took the goddamned lights out and they were _still coming_ and they were fucking defenseless without those fucking spotlights--

Foggy dropped the duffelbag and dug blindly inside for a flashlight, remembered he was digging through the fucking medical supplies, then fumbled for his own bag. The penlight was still at the bottom, and it wasn't much, but it got him back to the infirmary to find the actual flashlight. A big black one. It looked like the one he'd brained Matt with, a hundred years ago, back at the apartment.

Shuddering for breath, he went back into the hallway. Pushed the bags against the wall to keep his hands free for the flashlight and the rifle. He was either going to die here or get the fuck away, and if he managed the latter, he could come back for that bullshit.

Foggy surged around the corner, and there was fucking Karen. She had mud on her face, on her clothes-- she'd been outside, in the Park-- and her skin was pale. She did not look happy to see him.

He was _definitely_ not happy to see her, and demanded immediately: "Where is he?"

She didn't answer, just stared at him, her expression all horror that had been poorly wiped by trauma. Eyes wide, terrified. Pale and shattered. Jesus, _no_.

Everything shuddered to a stop inside of him.

"Karen, what did you _do?"_

Her face tightened. He wasn't sure if there was dampness in her eyes or if it was his flickering flashlight, casting the planes of her face into bizarre shapes. She raised one hand, dropped it, then lowered her head like she was expecting violence:

"I shot him."

His chest hurt. Everything hurt. Karen did it. She made good on her threat. She did it. While he was distracted in the infirmary trying to save Jack's life. A task that he'd failed spectacularly. And while he was watching the kid's life drain away, she'd fucking done it.

Karen killed Matt.

_"What?!"_

She lifted her hands again and stumbled to speak quickly. "With a tranquilizer! Fo--"

Foggy couldn't help but fucking repeat himself.

"What?!"  He nearly got a hernia stopping his fist from swinging out at her. He really wanted to. It frightened him how much he wanted to. His voice fell to a dangerous growl, a poor imitation of that machine he knew so well. "Karen, where the _fuck_ is he?!"

Her voice stumbled as she rushed to speak. "He's-- he's out in the Park--"

"--With the fucking aliens?!" His head was spinning, throbbing. He'd never had a moment in his life where he'd seen such a stunning shade of red.

"I couldn't-- I didn't--"

Foggy whirled on her, backing her into the corner of the hall. He was shaking everywhere. He was reminded of his friend. It hurt like hell. "Didn't _what?!_   How did you get him out there, Karen? What did you--"

A heavy noise, a rumble. Sounds above them, footsteps, except not from feet. He tore his eyes away from Karen to seek them out, and as he took a step back, there was a shattering crash from down the hall. Deborah's room. He knew it was Deborah's room, because the next sound was her scream.

They were inside the shelter.

Foggy was single-minded. He reached out and grabbed Karen by the upper arm. His own strength surprised him. "Take me to him. _Now_." He gave her the flashlight. They had no time. It was dark, and they were out there. Foggy knew this. He knew the second he left the light, he would be committing suicide.

He didn't give a fuck.

She was hesitating, so he roared, " _Now_ , Karen!"

Then she moved, shaky and awkward, but she was moving, and he rushed to follow after her. They were going in the wrong direction. He didn't want the garage or the courtyard, he wanted to get out into the woods and find his friend.

"That's not the way out," he shouted, ignoring another sharp scream from Deborah's room. If he helped her, he'd die. If he helped her, Matt would die. Neither of those things could happen. The weight in his decision was tearing his stomach apart, piece by piece.

Karen spoke quickly. Her voice was airless and weak and still so empty. "We're not leaving out the back. We're taking Eric's truck."

His own voice was breaking apart and just as frail. "Yeah, because a moving truck is really fucking inconspicuous when we have those things fucking running around out there!" What was she thinking? Was she trying to get him killed, too?

She looked at him over her shoulder. Her face was set back into that blank mask again.

"Spotlights, Foggy."

Anger leapt up in him and twisted his face more than hers ever fucking would. "Don't you call me that. You don't get to fucking call me that." Not her. Not now. Not ever fucking again. She fucking shot Matt. And if he was dead... _if he was dead..._

Foggy moved faster, outpaced her. "Faster. If he dies, it's on you."

"Then come on," she said, falling into a sprint, and he matched her speed as they came around the last corner to the garage.

A howling fissure of a roar poured down the corridor ahead of them, and then an actual fissure in the fucking roof as an alien broke through it. The cheap wooden paneling splintered and flew everywhere, the creature's body flickering, silver and iridescent, through the shuddering beam from the flashlight in Karen's hand. It beeped, lowed, and she didn't move, so Foggy moved for her. He grabbed her arm and threw her into the garage, and when he he slammed the door, the alien's voice answered the noise.

His whole body jerked with a flinch he couldn't stop, as if the bleeping roar had actually touched him. He couldn't feel his heartbeat anymore. It was just one buzzing sensation that curled red and white in the corners of his vision and he was panting, fighting not to hyperventilate, and they had no more time, they had to fucking _move._

"Keys?" he asked her, and his voice was nothing more than a weak bark.

"Glove compartment."

Foggy went for the driver's side, and she let him have it, climbing into the passenger seat. He tossed his rifle on the floor and leaned over to claw at the little hinged door; the keys spilled out into his hand.

The engine came to life the second he twisted them in the ignition. Small miracles.

"Haven't driven for a while." God, his voice was so fucking high and useless. Like the rest of him. _Matt. Please be okay, Matt. I'm coming, buddy._ "Thank fuck this is an automatic." Because he couldn't drive a manual.

The garage door lay shut in front of them; he put the truck into drive and slammed his foot on the gas pedal, plowing straight through it. Any other time, this would be fucking awesome, but right now, he simply held onto the image for later, because he wanted to tell Matt about this, he wanted to tell the story and explain to him what a truck and a garage and a gas pedal was.

Karen said something about the gate, but Foggy wasn't listening. He drove right through that, too, snapping the chain and the lock, throwing pieces everywhere, listened to the shriek the chainlink against the frame of the truck as it squeezed out underneath it. There was an answering cry from the direction of the shelter. Deborah was probably dead by now. He was a piece of fucking horseshit.

He glanced in the rear-view; saw silver. Heard a high bleeping rumble. Jesus, the noises they made. It was coming after them. He tried to get the truck to move faster but it fishtailed in all the mud.

"Where is he?" he demanded, to Karen, as loud as he could. His voice was unsteady and he wasn't sure it would ever right itself again.

It took her so long to answer that he almost repeated himself in a shout, but then she gestured to a side road that he could barely fucking see. No moonlight. Too cloudy. Fucking aliens. "That side-road, there. Quarter-mile out." 

The alien wailed again. He flinched. God, it was still after them. He couldn't even look in the rear-view, he was too goddamned scared.

Karen moved with a soft, "Hold on," and opened the sunroof. She opened the fucking sunroof like a fucking idiot and she was leaning forward and dicking with something in the dashboard and he shrieked because he couldn't stop himself.

"What the fuck are you doing?!"

He got a "Shut up," in response, and she flicked some switch near the radio's volume control, and climbed up, half-out of the sunroof.

Jesus, right. A spotlight. Eric had a spotlight installed on his truck. For this exact purpose. Smart bastard. Smart, idiotic, infected piece of shit bastard. Foggy kept his fingers gripped to the wheel-- he wasn't sure he'd be able to pry them off without a tool at this point-- and kept driving.

There was a snarl, otherworldly, and then a high, blaring shriek. He recognized that noise, for sure. Pain. She'd hurt it. _With the fucking spotlight_. Jesus, of course she had, that was why they were such pushovers in the daytime, that was why they were so goddamn unstoppable in the darkness. Why hadn't he and Matt thought of that shit? Foggy was furious at himself for not coming up with a similar idea.

Another unnatural form made of silver and mercury crossed into the headlights and he swerved, the truck jerking to one side, nearly tossing him into the door. The alien slipped out of his way, then came back around, and jumped up on the _fucking hood_ , going for Karen, and judging by her sudden cry of pain, it got her.

He couldn't look away from the road. He knew he'd crash. He knew he'd miss catching sight of Matt, and run him over. God, he didn't want to run him over. Foggy eased his foot off the gas pedal, the fear of that exact thing happening clenching into his brain and muscles.

The light above him twisted around and the alien on the roof shrieked and moved away. Karen was still aiming the fucking light, so she wasn't dead yet, that was good. He could still hear them, though, the two of them. They were hunting together, like a pack, like the ferals. God, he'd never seen two of them at once before. Not since the sky opened.

A flicker of something out ahead of him, in the mud. Fabric, clothing. He hit the brake pedal so hard that he threw Karen inside the truck, and she went straight to the floor, bleeding, but he didn't fucking _care_ , he had to get out there, he had to get to Matt. Foggy barely had the presence of mind to put the thing into park before tumbling out into the mud.

All around him was the shrieking. He didn't care. Foggy started running. There were footprints in the mud. He didn't know if they were fresh or not. _He didn't care._

The truck's headlights lit up the uneven edge in the mud and he raced toward it, lungs burning in the cold, and he was praying, out loud, a fractured, _"Please God please God please God please please please"_ as he approached it. Them. Two bodies, curled in the mud. One of them, dead, he could tell from here, but the other--

Foggy dropped to his knees, ignoring the cries, the shrieking all around him, and reached out, begging aloud for the body to not be stiff, to not be cold, to not be fucking dead. His fingers landed on a shoulder, an arm. A sob rocked him, but he forced it back and down and reached out with his other hand, feeling chilled fingers beneath his own, laying in the mud.

They were trembling. Like they always did. He forced out a breath, took in another, and let it out as a sob. Too loud, too loud, they were going to hear him. He had to move. No fucking time. They were going to die, they were going to die, they were going to die.

He placed his fingers on the body's neck, and felt it, Matt's pulse, underneath his cold skin, slow but steady. He was alive. He was freezing cold and sedated, but he was alive. Jesus Christ. He nearly passed out in utter relief.

Foggy grabbed Matt's arm and hauled it over his shoulder, then picked him up and ran back to the truck, leaving the other body behind. He didn't even care who it was, he didn't ever want to know, he had what he wanted and he had all he needed.

There was a shriek behind him and he did not falter. He got to the truck and tossed Matt inside and made to launch in after him, but there was a squeal behind him and sudden hot _agony_ in his leg, and he whipped his head around and there was an alien right on fucking top of him, digging into him, burning, _burning_ , another one of its arms scrabbling at the door, shrieking and beeping right in his fucking face, deafening, as it tried to yank him out of the truck.

He shrieked for help but no help would ever come. Foggy scrambled for something, anything, the rifle was on the floor, out of reach, he got one hand on the steering wheel and that was the only thing that stopped the alien from getting him out of the truck; his other hand found the flashlight and he grabbed it and swung, awkward, intending to hit it just like he'd hit his best friend in the apartment, but the light buzzed across its face instead and it flinched, and its claws left his skin, and he scrambled back inside the truck and slammed the door shut behind him before it could get a hold in him again.

It wailed, furious, recovering from the shock of the light with a surging scratch at the window, leaving furrows in the glass and down the side of the door. The noise of its claws tearing into the metal of the truck were a weak aftershock of its horrible earsplitting voice.

Foggy ignored it, put the truck into gear, and punched his unhurt foot into the gas pedal as hard as he could, and the truck leapt forward, nearly into a fucking tree, but he swung the steering wheel at the last second and he fishtailed instead. He couldn't feel the pain in his leg anymore, and he didn't know if it was still there. Blood, though, he could smell that. He could smell it everywhere, a coppery tang on the back of his tongue.

There was thumping and beeping behind him, on the road, and he remembered the sunroof, remembered that it was open, and half-lifted himself to shut it. His leg sang with total, absolute pain and he screamed. Lights in his eyes. When he went to sit back down, winded, shuddering, everything felt slippery, and he knew he must be bleeding, badly.

Foggy released his frantic pressing into the gas pedal and yanked off his sweater, fumbling and shaking as he tied it off around his leg. He just needed a little more time. Just a little more.

Enough to get them away from here. He leaned down toward Karen-- Karen, Jesus, he'd almost forgotten she was there, she was so small, crumpled on the floor-- and checked her pulse, calling her name. He didn't get a response, but he could feel her heartbeat and that was a start, at least.

He focused back on the steering wheel and the road again. His whole body was shivering like a live wire, a million volts, all terror and adrenaline. He slammed down on the gas and the truck jumped forward, and its tires hissed in the mud, got purchase, started moving. The shrieking faded slowly behind him. Still he drove.

He didn't know where to go. He didn't know what to do.

Karen was pale and unresponsive on the floor, but she was breathing, she was alive. Matt was curled up, boneless, on the seat, but he was alive. All three of them. They were alive and they were getting the fuck out of here.

He thought of Deborah and Brian and nearly vomited; he swallowed it down, focused on the road again, at the searing thrum of pain in his leg. Just drive. Just fucking move.

The muddy road gave way to pavement. The truck's engine roared and he pushed it as hard as he could, leaving the shelter and Deborah and Brian and the distant chorus of shrieking behind as he turned onto a cracked and empty street and sped off, a coward, into the darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _If there's discretion that you've not abandoned, now's the time._  
>  AFI


	12. el mañana

Seriously, Foggy had the worst fucking life in the world.

The pavement was uneven beneath the truck's tires. Every time he hit a crack, everyone inside the cab shifted around and his leg flared with pain. It had, at least, stopped bleeding, as far as he could tell, but it _hurt_. He'd left the truck's spotlight on, pointing behind him and bobbing with every imperfection in the road. He kept glancing at the rear-view every other second to make sure he wasn't being pursued. It was dark and silent.

His heart hadn't slowed at all in his chest. He didn't even know he could have a heartrate so fast for so long and not die from it.

It had been a while since he'd heard any high beeping or chittering. He was dizzy, but he wasn't sure if it was because of the blood that had drained out of his leg or the adrenaline that was still draining out of his body.

He drove until he couldn't stand the fucking pain anymore. He had no fucking idea where he was. Still in the Bronx; he'd only gone a few miles at the most. Until the bastards from the shelter had stopped chasing him. He pulled the truck into an alley, watching the spotlight's glow bob to and fro as the tires shifted over piles of ash and decomposed _everything_. God, he was probably being ghosted by every goddamn feral and alien in a ten-mile radius with the sound of the truck's diesel engine.

His fingers were curved stiffly, glued over the wheel, and creaked when he removed them. He put the truck into park and, for just a few seconds, rested his forehead on the wheel. His leg shivered with pain. The urge to stay there forever pressed down on his shoulders.

Then he took a deep breath, pulled away, and went to work.

He twisted the keys in the ignition, shutting off the engine. Quarter-tank of gas left. He hunted down the flashlight and turned it on, resting it on the dashboard, then fumbled for the spotlight controls to stop it from draining the battery. His leg became total fire when he moved, pain leaping straight up his body and into his chest, but he gritted his teeth, tried to ignore it (impossible) and turned toward the others.

Matt hadn't moved since he'd been tossed onto the seat. Foggy grabbed his head and tilted it toward the flashlight, checking his eyes. No movement. He pressed his thumb hard against one of Matt's fingernails; pain response. No movement besides a barely-there, reflexive jerk. He was in deep. All he did otherwise was shiver, and that was only because of the cold and his tremors. What the fuck did Karen put in him?

"Sorry, buddy. I can't turn the heater on, it'll suck up all the gas," Foggy whispered, and his voice cracked through his dry throat, as he awkwardly curled Matt into a ball and moved him to the backseat, trying not to shout aloud at his damn leg. No reactions to anything meant Matt had another few hours to go, at least. Foggy dug around for a blanket, something to help with the cold, and couldn't find one-- but he found a first aid kit under the seat. Score.

Still, no blanket. "Just stay there, Matty, I'll be back to check on you."

Foggy sat back down, wincing, ignoring the blood smeared all over the place, how it was starting to dry to a dull brick-brown color. He pulled the first aid kit into his lap and opened it to check its contents. Butterfly strips, Band-Aids. Alcohol and gauze. Gloves and aspirin, and pure gold wrapped in sterile packaging. Suture. He let out a heavy breath and leaned his head back in a silent thanks to the poison in the sky, because he knew Matt's God wasn't there. No forceps, but there were tweezers, and a shitty pair of scissors, and he'd worked with less.

He set the kit aside and twisted round awkwardly to check himself over. The wound-- wounds-- were on the back of his right leg. He could feel the lacerations pulling every time he moved, and he wasn't sure if he could walk on it, which was just fucking peachy.

Foggy grabbed a roll of the gauze and chewed hard on his tongue as he hiked his pant leg up, blowing out a heavy breath through his nose and a high sound from his throat that reminded him of Matt. It was just a leg, and not his hands, or his head, which were the two most important things he had right now. He yanked up the middle seat's belt and stuffed it in his mouth to bite down on, to muffle the uncontrollable sounds from his throat as he started to wrap his leg up. The tourniquet had to come off.

It only took a few minutes, but they were some awful fucking minutes, culminating in Foggy huffing hard through his nose as he untied the sweater from around his leg. The feeling of blood blooming back through his skin and down to the wounds was total bright-white _pain_ and he leaned hard against the seat, panting, fighting off the vertigo and the compulsion to just lie down and let the pain take him. No, he had too much to do.

Foggy had nearly torn the damn seatbelt in half by the time the pain finally began to recede, and he rubbed his forehead on the pleather seats, skin slick with sweat. He was taking too long. He needed to help Karen. Like, right now. Fucking _move_ , you stupid body.

He pushed himself up, wincing, pausing to make sure he wasn't about to pass out. It didn't happen, but he definitely still wanted to die. Dragging in a few deep breaths that shuddered when they came back out of his chest, he straightened up, then leaned over the seats to drape his sweater carefully over the balled-up, shivering body he'd tossed back there.

Right, Karen. Foggy shifted his leg carefully. It didn't hurt to the point of screaming unless he moved it. Too bad he was going to have to move it. A lot. Karen, _Karen_ , you slow bastard, before she went into shock and died because he was too fucking slow and couldn't handle a couple of stupid cuts in his leg.

She was still on the floor, leaning against the seat, skin pale and damp with sweat. Her chest moved sluggishly as she breathed. Foggy leaned down and tilted her head up toward himself, patting her cheek. She reacted, eyebrows furrowing-- the most expression he'd ever seen on her face, because she was barely conscious and all of it was reflex. But she _was_ reacting, and that was a good sign.

"Hey," he said, a little louder than he'd spoken to Matt. "Paige."

Her eyelids flickered, then opened slowly. She leaned her head against his hand, confused. A noise came from her throat, a syllable, probably Eric's name, but it sounded more like it was just _Rick_. Where the fuck _was_ that asshole, anyway? Dead, probably. Hopefully. It'd be just Foggy's fucking luck for that asshole to survive an alien rampage.

Didn't matter.

"Can you hear me?" He snapped his fingers. "Paige."

She jolted at his snapping, lifting her head, wincing hard as the pain wracked her. One of her hands was crushed between her body and the seat and she tried to push away with it, tried to get up, but she was uncoordinated. Blood loss. Could be worse.

"I need you to talk to me," Foggy said, snapping his fingers again, grabbing her attention.

"Huh?"

"Paige."

"Uh-huh?"

Foggy sighed and gently grabbed her other arm. "Sorry. I have to move you. I can't help you from down there." He clenched his jaw at the pain in his leg and hauled her up onto the seat. Almost immediately, he had to slap his other hand over her mouth to muffle her scream. "Shh. Shut up, Paige. You're gonna attract shit."

The pain had brought her half-back to consciousness, and she tried to lift her head from where it had flopped back against the side of the passenger headrest, tried to lift a hand to push him off. Foggy removed his hand when her breathing was even again-- well, mostly-- and she grunted a bewildered, "Wh...?"

"Hold still. You got injured. You're safe." As safe as any of them could be. He brushed his fingers up along her temple, finding a hard knot. The alien that had leapt up on the goddamn roof must have slammed her against the spotlight. Or Foggy had done it when he hit the brakes and tossed her into the dashboard. Didn't matter. "Hey, focus. Can you talk to me?"

"...Huh?"

He lifted her chin again, and she glared at him, half-awake.

Foggy sighed. Time for the brain stuff. To see if she had a really horrible concussion, or was just banged up and rattled. "Can you, uh, tell me your name? Date? Where you think you're at?" He couldn't even count how many times he'd asked Matt the same questions.

She thought a second and eventually settled on, "...Paige."

"Is that your last name, or your first name?"

"First."

"Paige Page? Cute."

She rolled her eyes. He took it as a good sign. "Shut up."

Foggy snorted. "What day is it, _Karen?"_

"How the fuck should I know, _Frank?"_

Minor concussion, then. Rattled. Lucky. He leaned forward and turned her away from him so he could get to the wounds on her back. She hissed, but then clenched her jaw to keep herself quiet. If she was conscious enough to know she had to keep her fucking voice down, it was an even better sign.

"Hold still," he mumbled, pulling her jacket down off of her shoulders. It was damp with blood.

All of her clothes were. Foggy got the jacket off, and made to set it aside, but then shook it once and leaned into the back to place it over Matt, who had his face pressed into the backseat, drooling, totally fucking out of it. He wasn't going to like the smell, but it was better than nothing.

Foggy turned the flashlight so the beam was pointing mostly at Karen, and leaned in to take a look, peeling back the wet fabric of her shirt as gently as he could.

She still hissed, leaning forward and placing her hands on the passenger side door.

"Sorry," he said. "Looks like you took a cheese grater to yourself." Foggy dug around in the first aid kit and grabbed the scissors. "I gotta cut this shit off to get to it. I promise I'm not trying to get fresh."

Karen just grunted instead of replying.

The scissors were shit. Huge surprise. Foggy ended up just ripping her shirt carefully down the middle and pushing the fabric to either side. Three fairly nasty gashes and a half-dozen smaller ones. He could see the burns on the edges of the wounds, and when he was up this close, he could smell stretched rubber bands and singed flesh. She wasn't bleeding anymore, at least.

Foggy put a hand on the back of her neck to lean her forward more, and she complied. Her skin was pale. "Tell me if you're gonna puke, because I don't want it--"

"I'm gonna puke."

He tossed the kit aside and squeezed past her to get the passenger door open, hauling her out just in time for her to upchuck into the alleyway. Noodles. Gross. His leg burned and he muffled his gasp of pain in the back of his throat, loosening his grip around her waist as he leaned with his other hand on the dashboard to fight off dizziness. No, he couldn't pass out yet. He didn't have the time.

"You done?" he asked, through his teeth.

Karen coughed and spat. "Yeah."

Foggy started to pull her back into the car, but paused halfway with his hands on her shoulders. "Hey, grab the door."

She fumbled her hands over the handle for a second before clutching it, and he pulled her and the door at the same time to shut it. God, it was cold outside. He took another glance at Matt as he positioned Karen in the seat again. Still breathing. If Foggy didn't pass out because of his leg, and the sedative lasted long enough, he was going to go poke around in Matt's knee again and clean it out. Who knew what the fuck he'd gotten in it out in the mud. Count your blessings, Nelson.

"Okay, you're gonna have to hold still a while. I'm gonna put you back together." He wasn't sure why. She certainly hadn't earned it.

"Uh-huh." Karen leaned against the door again, bracing herself for the pain. She'd gone through this sort of shit before, Foggy thought, when he started clearing away the blood and saw old scars carving pale pathways into the skin of her back. She grunted. "Did that kit... have aspirin in it?"

"Yeah." He paused and dug out one of the little packs, tossing it onto her lap.

"Thanks," she breathed, ripping it open with her teeth, and swallowing the pills dry.

Foggy went for the alcohol, clenching his fists for a second to try to stop his hands from shaking so badly. He warned her, at least, even though some vindictive part of him didn't want to. She flinched, and gasped, but he saw a muscle jumping in her jaw, underneath the deep scar on her face, as she muffled any noises that could've come out.

To his surprise, she talked, and to his utter astonishment, she asked, "Where's Matt?"

He was so shocked, he took a moment to reply. "...Uh. He's in the back."

The muscles in her back stiffened momentarily beneath his hands, but he didn't know if it was in pain, or a reaction to the knowledge of having a feral so close by. He could hear her teeth grinding before she spoke again. The next question nearly blew his damn socks off. "He okay?"

Foggy answered honestly. The words hurt as they left him. "I don't know. He's really out of it." He set aside a few pieces of used gauze, dark pink in the flashlight's diffused beam. Careful to keep the anger out of his voice, although he didn't know why he was bothering, he asked, "What did you put in him?"

"I... I don't know. Eric loaded it."

"Of course he did." Foggy sighed, but had the decency to tilt his head down so he didn't blow a hard breath against the open wounds on her back. "I'd really like an explanation of why my best friend's comatose in the back right now. Seriously, why did you _do that to him?"_   He couldn't keep the fury out of his words, that time; they leaked through the cracks between his syllables, dark and sharp.

"He... he was..." she sighed, clenched her jaw, unclenched it, "...I was in the Park with Eric. Fo-- _Frank_ , he was infected."

"I tried to tell you." Foggy pushed her forward again, then leaned over to move the flashlight to a better angle, pausing afterward to wait for the vertigo to fade. He braced himself with the steering wheel to stop from pitching onto the floor. "...You didn't listen."

"I know that." Karen's fingers were digging into the thin fabric over the truck door. For a second, he wished he could see her face, to try to find some sort of absolvement for himself there, but it was probably as stiff and empty as ever. "Eric, he... attacked me, and Matt..."

Foggy frowned as she trailed off, his hands stilling over her back. "He saved you?"

She sighed. "Yeah."

Of course he did. Moron. "Seriously, Matt?" He started moving again, finishing with the alcohol, balling his hands into fists for a few long moments-- for two reasons, now-- before finding one of the packages of suture. "Fucking idiot."

Karen made a strange noise. Foggy couldn't figure out what it was, but it sounded like a mix between a lengthy sigh and a short, faint groan. Her voice was slightly tremulous now, he thought. "...He would have killed me, Frank. Eric was going to kill me."

"I'm guessing that was the other body out there with him. Stitches," he warned, before digging in with the needle.

"Matt broke his--" she hissed, and flinched, but continued talking, through her teeth, "--Eric's neck."

Foggy worked as quickly as he could, and kept talking, trying to distract her even though she didn't deserve any of it. It'd always helped with Matt, back when Matt could carry a conversation.

"Yeah, he's good at that."

"He--" a soft, faint whine, "--saved me."

"Again, huh? Why are you surprised?"

Karen didn't answer his question. She dragged sharp breaths in and out of her chest, small ones, because they pulled at the gashes on her back less. "...I shot him," she eventually said, and her voice was shaking again. Probably from the pain, Foggy assumed, but then her voice dropped low and quiet like there was something in her throat, and he almost stopped stitching her up because it sounded so strange. So _real_. "...He asked me... 'why'."

Jesus. Of course he had. He wouldn't have understood any of it. He'd probably acted completely on instinct, and, just like the last time he'd saved someone from the shelter (barring Foggy himself), the person he'd helped turned on him. Foggy felt anger and that cold dark _sadness_ roll around in his insides, imagining what Matt had felt when she'd tagged him with that dart. He could very clearly visualize that confused, lost expression. Foggy hoped it had burned her as badly as it would have burned him.

Matt didn't deserve that. He didn't _deserve it._

As if she could hear his thoughts, "I didn't mean to, Frank." She spoke so quietly, it took him a long few seconds to decipher it. When her voice shook this time, he knew that it was not because of the pain. "I didn't mean to do it."

After that, she fell silent, and didn't talk anymore.

Foggy kept his hands busy, working as fast as he could. Karen was a surprisingly good patient. She ended up with sixteen stitches, four butterfly strips, and one severely ruined shirt.

"You're not gonna want to... sit back on that. Obviously," he said, returning the tweezers and scissors to the first aid box. "Just, uh... sit sideways."

Karen carefully turned herself around. Her face passed through the flashlight's beam, and he could see that her eyes were rimmed in red, just slightly. Enough for it to look strange and alien on her normally blank expression. She was _crying_ , or some faint shitty charade of crying, but he didn't know why, and he didn't ask or comment.

"Uh, your jacket. I put it on Matt, do you still want it, or...?"

"Just give it to me," she breathed, tilting her head down and refusing to look at him.

He did, then grabbed the first aid kit and pushed down the middle seat so he could climb into the back with _Mr.-Still-Saving-Girls-What-An-Asshole_. His leg twinged, but not as badly as before. Not having open wounds dragging across the truck's seating was helping.

"Your leg," Karen said softly, pulling her jacket on.

"I'll take care of it later. Well, _you'll_ have to. Pay me back for the shit I just did for you." Foggy settled himself gingerly into the backseat. He was still dizzy as hell, and took a long moment to let the vertigo fade. "...Get the flashlight and point it for me, okay?"

She didn't move. She didn't want to do it.

Foggy scoffed, and it left his lips warm with anger. "Hey, this little shit saved your fucking life, the least you can do is point a damn flashlight at him."

He thought he saw her roll her eyes, but she still leaned forward, wincing, and took it off the dashboard. Sighing, she leaned her shoulder into the seat, placing the flashlight next to her on the headrest, like it was too heavy to carry. Her eyes were still downturned. "His leg, right?"

"Yeah." He grabbed the limb in question and tugged it out from the shuddering little ball that Matt had turned into.

Her voice was so faint, like her words were being muffled by the entire rest of her body. "It was, um. Bleeding. When he was... yeah."

"No shit. I just put these in the other day." Foggy brushed off the mud and dirt, frowning at the lines of dried blood that had trailed, unchecked, down his friend's leg, and pushed up his still-too-short cargo pants. The gauze was fucked; he threw it on the floor. "Aaand they're ripped out, which is _super_ awesome. Thanks, Matty." _Thanks, Paige_ , he added, in his head.

He should have told her about Eric. _Really_ told her. _Everyone_ was eating the blame for this stupid situation.

Karen tilted the light so it was illuminating the space he was working with. He tried not to look too shocked, but he knew he did; he felt his eyebrows raise. Foggy grabbed the kit, digging out the safety scissors to cut out the fucked stitches. On reflex, he grabbed the alcohol and spread some of it over the scissor blades.

"You haven't got, like, Hepatitis or anything, right?" he asked, because it was fucking dark in the truck, and he didn't have the time or a sink to scrub them off with.

"...No."

"AIDS?"

"Frank."

"Look, I gotta ask. Matt's already got that fucking virus in him, I don't wanna share tools between the two of you and kill him with something less cool."

She made a harsh sound. A scoff, probably. "I don't have anything."

"All right." He went to work again. The scissors were a pile of dogshit and it took a while. Nobody spoke.

He threw the wasted suture to the floor and went for the alcohol. At least he wouldn't have to hear that whine this time.

Matt _did_ respond, though, when Foggy disinfected it, but only with a weak grumbling growl and nothing else. A reflex against the pain. The flashlight beam shuddered as Karen reacted to it, and Foggy scoffed. "He's not going to leap up and attack you, Paige. It's just a reflex."

She didn't say anything.

Foggy kept talking anyway, just not to her. "Matty, Matty. You and your stupid leg. And your stupid _saving-people_ bullshit. _This_ happened to you last time, why'd you do it again?"

Karen let out a breath. He ignored her.

He got the mud out and dug around-- fucking gross, seriously-- to make sure there wasn't actually another splinter in there that he'd missed, because he was probably not going to have another opportunity like this anytime soon. The wound was far less deep, he noted to himself, hiding his smile. It'd been healing, or trying to.

Matt huffed and drooled on the pleather when Foggy started wrapping it back up, tightly, bracing one thumb against the inside of Matt's leg to make sure he wasn't cutting off his circulation.

Foggy went to tie it off and Matt growled again, but Karen didn't jump, that time.

She did start talking, though. Her voice was empty again. "No stitches?"

"No, not right now. We're going to need his help, and he's not gonna be able to if he's got any in."

"Help? For what?" She didn't seem interested in that at all.

Foggy sighed. "Well, we have to go back. When there's daylight." He worried at his bottom lip and carefully pulled the leg of Matt's pants back down. "See if anyone survived."

Karen didn't move the flashlight, but the light was shivering minutely now. "You think anyone did?"

He busied himself with trying to make Matt as comfortable as possible, and for once, he wasn't the one staring her down. His voice was faint, even to himself. "...No. No, I don't." There had been too many aliens, and that big one-- Jesus. He'd never seen anything like it before. He didn't even know they could get that big.

"Supplies, then," Karen said.

"...Yeah. We're going to need them. Even if the building's still standing, we can't..." he sighed and shook his head, and went to carefully spread the sweater back over his friend's body, then changed his mind all at once and tugged Matt against him. If she reacted to it, he wasn't looking. "I... we... can't live there... anymore."

"Not if the aliens know about it."

That wasn't Foggy's reasoning, but he didn't correct her, settling Matt's head on his leg, casting the sweater back over him and listening to his gentle breathing. "We're going to need supplies, and if the building's been busted up, we're gonna need someone to help us find 'em. There's not enough time in the day right now to sift through it all." It was winter, or nearly winter, after all. Short days, long nights. And it was going to be the longest fucking night ever in this alley, cramped in a truck with Karen.

"So why Matt, then?" Dull voice, like she didn't care, but Foggy looked at her, and she was staring at the seat and not him. Nice try, Paige.

He leaned forward, gritting his teeth to wall off the pain in his leg, and took the flashlight, turning it off. It cast the three of them into darkness, but he didn't want to waste the batteries, and she didn't ask to have it turned back on again, so she must have thought the same.

Foggy put the flashlight on the floor and settled carefully back into the seat. In the dark, he tugged Matt closer, feeling the uneven, gentle vibration of the tremor that was trapped between his friend's body and the seat. A constant. A comfort.

"He's got that sense of smell. I told you. He can find anything. I mean, if he knows what he's looking for. God, it'll be so..." he trailed off. Karen wouldn't care that Foggy was excited to teach his brain damaged friend new things, to not have him locked in a room all day and night, to give him actual freedom-- and to see the look on his face when he got it.

Karen pressed him anyway. "It'll be what?" The tone of her voice reminded him, weakly, of the woman he once knew a lifetime ago. It hurt.

"Please don't start acting like you give a shit about him, Paige. The last thing he needs is more confusion when you're involved." He sighed. Matt was already going to flip shit when he realized Karen was with them in the truck. "You wanted to go to Brooklyn, right? I'll take you there."

She answered slowly. "I was going to go with Eric."

"You can still go."

"No. Not..." she let out a tiny breath, and spoke in an even tinier voice. "Not alone."

Foggy felt his eyebrows raise again. "Okay. Is there another shelter, or...?"

Karen shook her head, barely perceptible in the darkness of the truck. "No. I don't, really... I don't... have anywhere. To go."

Foggy felt some strange feeling humming in his chest, in the air around him. It reminded him of the Park, and finding Matt there, and the awful and amazing decision to take him back. That massive, shaking grin that spread across his friend's face.

"That's okay," he said. "Neither do we."

She didn't respond.

He chose his words carefully. "You could come with us."

At that, she let out a hard scoff. Without being able to view the hard mask of her face, it sounded horribly frail. Fake. "...No, I don't think so." And she sounded so, so hesitant. Maybe he should start talking to her with his eyes closed. "If Deborah's truck is still there, I'll take it."

"Well, the offer is open, Paige."

"...I appreciate that."

"You know..." he blew out a breath and tugged Matt closer, "...you know that you don't have to be alone, right?"

She didn't answer, but he was sure he heard her slow indrawn breath at his words, even though he wasn't too clear on what it meant. All of her still shut behind those darkened doors and hallways.

He needed to find more keys.

\---

They stayed in the truck and listened to the sounds around them. Howling, screeching. Ferals in a pack somewhere on the other side of the neighborhood. High wails from far off, and Foggy couldn't tell if they were from the shelter or not, because he wasn't sure exactly how far away he'd gotten.

Nobody slept, except for Matt, slumped over Foggy's lap and drooling.

Hours passed them by, and he didn't wake up. Didn't shift, didn't make any noise. He stayed where he was, breathing slow and shallow. After a while, the minutes ticking by began to seem like days, and that cold awful worry in Foggy's gut started to spread to his chest and his heart. Matt wasn't waking up. He wasn't coming out of it.

Foggy wasn't too sure how long it had actually been. The clock on the truck dashboard read around four in the morning, and Karen had shot him right around sundown-- nearly eight hours ago. Ketamine put him out for around four hours, so Foggy knew it wasn't that. What the fuck had been in that goddamned dart? A mixture? A cocktail?

He bent down and scooped the flashlight back up-- his leg stilled him for a few long moments in a half-bent position-- and clicked it on to check Matt over again. Maybe he'd missed something. A head wound or spinal injury. His gut felt like a blizzard was happening inside it.

Foggy checked his eyes. Still nothing.

Karen spoke up quietly from the front seat. She was so fucking quiet that it'd been hard to tell if she was even there or not. "I thought he was blind."

"...He is."

"What are you looking for, then?"

Foggy wanted to smile at the fact that she was pushing for more information, but he was too freaked out about Matt possibly being in a fucking coma to do anything. He rested his hand on Matt's neck, feeling his pulse, still slow and steady, thrumming beneath his fingertips.

"Movement," he answered, anyway. "Not dilation, just... his eyes move around a lot."

"I wouldn't know."

Ah, yes, an indirect way of asking 'Why?'. Foggy was onto her game. She couldn't hide it from him. "You're allowed to ask questions," he said, looking up in her direction. The glow from the flashlight lit along the edge of her face, throwing her angles into relief, making her look a lot more expressive than she probably was.

She fell quiet again. Well, it'd been worth a shot. Luckily, Foggy had a lot of patience, and an ass-load of practice with digging words out of people that didn't want to or couldn't talk.

Great. He was the only person in this triad of insane survivors that knew how to properly string sentences and emotions together. Fun.

Still, though. _Matt wasn't fucking waking up._ Foggy sat and chewed on a thumbnail, listening to his friend's breathing, rubbing a thumb idly over his brow, through the hair over his ear. If he was awake, he'd probably be in heaven.

"Super unhappy with you right now," Foggy directed to Karen.

"I gathered that."

"Are you _sure_ you don't know what you put in him?"

"I'm sure."

Foggy sighed and rolled his head on the headrest. His eyes hurt, because he was fucking exhausted, because he was trying not to fucking break into a thousand pieces over the fact that his friend might never fucking wake up, and the reason for it was sitting right in front of him. He hissed a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Karen spoke up again. "It's been a long time."

He didn't remove his hand from his face. "No shit."

"Is he going to wake up?"

"He fucking better." Foggy didn't even attempt to school the growl from his voice, the unsaid warning. He hoped she'd been paying attention just like he had, and was starting to learn how to read expressions without them being read to her. Desperation and panic were starting their slow climb up his throat and to his head. God.

"Has he been sedated before?"

Foggy felt his jaw clench up tight and fought to get it to relax, so he could talk. He took his hand from his face and put it back down on Matt, pushing his fingers into his hair. _Just wake up, man, please just wake up. I can't do this without you_. "...Yes."

"Before all this shit happened?" She was probably gesturing to the alley outside the truck, to indicate she was talking about the world crumbling to grey-black dust, but he wasn't looking.

He hated his answer. He hated that it was the truth. "...After."

He could hear the curiosity in her voice. It would probably sound nice in any other situation. It sounded like Karen had, before she died. "When?"

"A couple times... a while back." He didn't want to go into details.

She asked for more details. "Why?"

"Um, I don't know, because he's feral and has zero sense of self-preservation?" Foggy pushed out the words through gritted teeth. He didn't want to talk about this. He'd been desperate, terrified, and had no other options, at the time-- but his mind reminded him that she'd probably been just as scared, out alone in the dark with a feral that had just fucking killed someone in front of her.

Karen fell quiet for a minute. Thinking. She lifted her head and he didn't want to answer her next question. Fortunately, it wasn't a question. Unfortunately, it was something worse. "...You're angry at me for drugging him... but you do it all the time."

"Not-- not all the time, Paige, goddamn. In emergencies."

God, he could _hear_ her eyebrow raise in the darkness. It was a detail provided entirely by his own brain. "That wasn't an emergency, back there?"

Dammit. "You know what I mean."

"...No, I really don't." Her voice was stronger now. It sounded almost like the woman who used to burn the coffee every morning. He was torn between wanting to hear more of it and wanting to slap tape over her mouth to shut her the hell up. "Was he really so dangerous that you had to drug him to keep yourself safe?"

Foggy lifted his head from the seat to give her a glare she wouldn't see. "Me? No. Fuck no, Paige, it was never because _I_ was in danger. Jesus." He shook his head sharply. "He's never hurt me. Ever." Foggy was burying his fingers deeper and deeper into Matt's hair, holding him closer, protectively. "It was to keep _him_ safe, not me."

Her voice was so bitter that he could taste it in her words from all the way in the backseat. "Too bad you weren't in your room when Eric attacked me. You could have put him under and saved yourself the trouble."

"Don't be fucking ridiculous, Paige. What, did you _not_ want to be saved?"

Again, she slipped into silence. He could have lifted the flashlight and gotten a good look at her, to see what her face could tell him, but he didn't. He wanted to.

Foggy let his head fall back again. It was too heavy to lift. God, he was tired. "I did it when he was freaking out, so that he wouldn't run off alone and get himself killed. I did it when he was too injured to fight back and I didn't want to see the pain on his face when I had to put him back together. I'm a huge fucking coward, Paige, okay? Does that answer your stupid fucking question?" He shut his eyes. His leg was throbbing again.

Apparently it didn't fucking answer the question, because she still had more. He wanted to yank them out of her mouth and throw them in the river. "What were you giving him?"

"Ketamine."

"Was it in the infirmary?"

"You kidding? It was in my room. It's mine. It's for Matt, specifically." Because it worked. But whatever shit Eric had put in it could very well have killed him. He never wanted to touch that shit for as long as he lived. However long _that_ would be. "Am I gonna get in trouble for hoarding, now?"

"Shut up." Karen's voice was moving quicker now. How she would have spoken back in her previous life, when she'd found a scrap of information to apply to whatever she was working on. Foggy both reveled and recoiled from it. "Eric got the drugs from the infirmary. Do you remember what was in there?"

God, of course not. "Nope."

She sighed. "Well, it was worth a shot." By the time she'd finished her sentence, she sounded like Paige again.

Foggy grit his teeth again before realizing that, God, she was trying to fucking help. She was trying to help him and his more-than-likely-overdosed, unresponsive _feral_ friend. His jaw relaxed. For two seconds, he wondered what had changed in her to allow that to happen, but _oh fucking right_ , Matt had saved her sorry ass from Eric and she'd shot him for it.

If she was only helping out of guilt, he didn't want it, but if she was finally starting to realize that Matt wasn't a ravenous goddamned monster, he was all fucking for that.

He had to ask. "So, what, are you okay with him, now?"

Karen blew out a breath. "I don't know."

Foggy rolled his eyes. Of course she knew. She just didn't want to spit the words out. That would be a change in her life, in how she had to view the world, and this poor copy of her rubbed into shitty paper with goddamn ash was not a big advocate for that.

The shelter getting attacked made for some pretty fucking hefty changes, though.

_And motherfucking Christ damn bullshit asshole, Matt still wasn't waking up!_

Foggy's stomach was still swirling and it was starting to get agonizing. He lifted his head from the seat again and removed his hand from Matt's hair-- hell, at least he'd gotten some of those damned knots out-- to lift his head up. "Come on, man," he breathed. "Come back. You gotta come back."

If Karen heard him, she didn't respond to it.

"Matty, _please_. Don't make me do this alone." Foggy bent over himself and pushed in close to his friend, pressing their foreheads together, and no, he wasn't going to fucking cry, he'd cried enough, fuck that shit. "I haven't even had you for a week, buddy, and I already fucked it up again."

Nothing. Of course nothing. He sighed and stayed in the same position, ignoring the burn in his leg. He would stay here for the rest of his life if that was what he needed to grasp his friend's hand and pull him out of that oil-black slick of whatever the hell he was trapped in.

It was exactly ten minutes later when Matt jerked with a muffled grumble, banging their foreheads together. Foggy was so surprised he nearly dropped Matt on the fucking floor.

"Jesus Christ, _finally_ ," he hissed with a huge outward breath, one that he'd been holding for far too goddamn long. "Fucking Christ, Matt, there you are."

Matt made a weird grunting sound, fingers scratching weakly against the seat as he tried to lift himself up, then went slack again a second later. Recovery. This was totally Foggy's _favorite_ part of having his friend sedated.

He'd all but pulled the bastard into his lap over the last few hours. Matt grunted into Foggy's chest as he tried to break free of what was holding him, unaware that it was Foggy's arms. A low whine of confusion bubbled out of his throat and, again, he went boneless.

"Shh, shh, Matty, it's okay. You got drugged. You're coming out of it," he whispered into his friend's ear, feeling his voice cracking but not giving half a damn about it or the fact that Karen could hear it. "Shh, relax."

Karen spoke anyway. "He's waking up?"

"Yeah, what's it look like?" Foggy didn't remove his focus off of Matt, tightening his arms again as Matt grumbled and shifted, momentarily cresting the effect of the drug. Just like all the other times. Finally, something Foggy was familiar with.

Karen didn't say anything else, but he knew she was watching, anyway.

Matt pushed against him, grumbling as he broke the surface of sedation again, a shivering rhythm of coherence and emptiness, clawing his way back to consciousness in jerky, inconsistent amounts. "F'g," he huffed, breath hot against Foggy's throat. Speech. Thank fucking God in heaven and Thor and his creepy hammer cult. He was talking.

"I'm here. You got drugged, Matty," Foggy said, holding him tightly. "You're just waking up. You're safe. Calm, buddy, stay calm."

Matt half-babbled and half-grunted something, a pile of unconnected syllables falling out of his mouth alongside a pretty gross puddle of drool. Foggy really could have given less of a fuck. Matt tried to talk again, failed again. He got his hands working, somehow, and tried to push off from Foggy's chest, but faltered halfway and went all floppy with an annoyed grunt.

"Heh, yeah, you're all messed up, dude. Just stay with me. Okay?"

It was like having a hundred-twenty pound ragdoll flung all over him. A ragdoll that drooled like the fucking Hoover Dam.

Matt tried to ask a question, and Foggy knew that, but the clusterfuck that poured out of his mouth sounded like... well, it sounded like fucking Punjabi. Foggy didn't bother to answer, because Matt wasn't going to understand a word of it, in the state he was in.

"Just hold still. Try to rest."

"M'g'f'g," Matt said, two syllables sailing out on a river of drool and confusion. Foggy tried to translate and only picked up what could have possibly been his name and a curse word.

"Are you even speaking a language, dude?"

Again, Matt tried to say his name, but got stuck on the 'Fff' part, and then apparently became enamored with it, because he spent the next few minutes hissing it out non-stop. Drugs.

"Yeah, yeah. Just stay with me. You'll come out of it soon."

Foggy leaned back in the seat-- he couldn't even _feel_ his fucking leg anymore-- and listened as Matt kept trying to talk. He already sucked ass at it, but the drugs were just making his grumbling voice a smear of incomprehensible sounds. Oh, and the drool, he couldn't forget about that.

About fifteen minutes went by of that bullshit, Foggy holding him carefully as he clawed his way out of that awful maw of anesthesia, slipped in and out of consciousness like a rolling tide, and eventually dragged himself out of the dark and deep water and stayed awake. About as long as it took with the ketamine. He'd just been under for a _lot_ longer.

Matt was shivering, blinking slowly, pushed up into Foggy's chest and face, when Karen shifted in the front seat. Immediately, Matt reacted, lifting his head weakly.

She started to say something. "Is it--"

Two words were all she got out before Matt panicked, scrabbling at Foggy's chest for a half second before pushing himself away. He nearly went face-first into the cab door but his hands, thankfully, found it first, and he made a sharp whine of terror as he started clawing at it.

Foggy surged forward with more reflex than anything, grabbing Matt around the waist, and holy hell was that the worst thing he could have possibly done. There was no knowing how well Matt was seeing the world around him, but he was disoriented and confused and now he was being held down in a cramped space that he couldn't get out of. With someone who scared the piss out of him sitting in the front seat.

Also, it made Foggy's leg feel like it had just been ripped right the fuck off, so that was good.

Matt bucked, trying to get away, whimpering out nothing but disjointed, frightened nonsense. He scrabbled at Foggy's hands around him, and when they didn't budge, he twisted, going for the car door again.

"No no no, Matt, Matt, Matty, calm down, hey, calm the hell down, it's okay!" Foggy tugged him away from the door again, pulling him down the seat-- his leg, goddammit, the stupid fucking thing was _screaming;_ a high grunt left his mouth as it dragged against the seat's frame, and then there were lights sparkling in his eyes, black and white and blinding-- not now, not now, Jesus, not right now, just a little more time, _please--_

Matt struggled against his hold, not even trying to speak anymore, just making terrified little yelping noises. He pushed at Foggy's chest and for some reason Foggy's stupid arms stopped working and let go. What the fuck, that wasn't what he wanted to do, but his body chose it for him, and the agony was traveling up against his right side like fire-- _hey, Matty, look, we're the same--_

It hurt so bad. His brain wouldn't let him spit out words anymore. He heard Karen yell something, and his thoughts burned out to a harsh and sudden nothingness and he swore he heard someone crying before it all went dark.

\---

Foggy opened his eyes and saw daylight casting itself into the tinted windows of the truck. He was on his back and that horrible burning agony in his leg had faded to a dull throb. "What the fuck?" he tried to say, but it was all mumbles and slurs.

A voice answered him, from the front seat. "Oh, good morning." Karen. What was that? Was that fucking _sarcasm_ in her voice? "You're a fucking idiot, Frank."

"Knew that," he grumbled, pushing himself up, eyes fluttering shut as the vertigo crashed into him. Yeah, he was still in the truck. There was a fresh and far more evenly placed bandage on his leg. It felt a lot less like shredded cheese now. Foggy opened his eyes and turned his head and there was Karen in the front, leaning against the headrest. She looked extremely unimpressed. "The fuck happened?"

"You passed out."

Oh, perfect. "Didn't really want to do that."

She was glaring at him. "Then why didn't you fix your fucking leg?"

"Didn't have time," he said, looking around again. He was missing someone. His heart started pounding. "Where's Matt?"

"You needed twenty stitches, Frank."

"Where's Matt?"

"You could've bled to death."

"Matt," he repeated, because she obviously wasn't hearing him. There wasn't sign of him anywhere. Didn't she know that? "Where is he?"

"Don't worry about it, Frank, your leg--"

"Don't--?" What the _fuck_ , where the _fuck_ was he? Foggy shoved himself upright. God, his fucking leg was awful. He thought he might start breaking teeth with how hard he was clenching his jaw from the pain. "Where did he go?"

"Frank, _don't move._ You're going to fuck up your stitches, I'm not good at them--"

"Shut up." Foggy was already shoving himself to the door. Matt was out there, half-fucked from sedatives, alone. Jesus, God. "I gotta find him."

"Don't-- Frank, you shouldn't be--"

"Fuck you! Either help me or shut the hell up!" he snapped, pushing the door open. He nearly tumbled face-first into the alleyway; his hands clinging to the door's handle was the only thing that stopped him. Karen was shifting around, but he didn't look back at her. He staggered clumsily out into the dust and yeah, he probably shouldn't be walking. Didn't matter. He shouted Matt's name into the alleyway.

It was quiet. It was quiet and cold and Matt was going to fucking--

"Foggy."

He jerked to a stop, whipping his head around. That wasn't Karen. And it wasn't himself. He couldn't see anyone else.

"Here. Foggy."

Above him? He twisted around, searching the alleyway, the side of the truck, the tailbed, the roof, and--

And there Matt was, sitting against the spotlight in the morning sun. He looked equally afraid and relieved. Pale and shaky, but he was definitely alive, and awake. He had his arms crossed on top of his knees, and his knees up to his chest, and he tilted his head in greeting.

"I told you not to worry about it," Karen grumbled from the cab. She did not sound happy. At least she didn't sound empty. "He's been up there since I started stitching you together. Calmed down a hell of a lot when you passed out."

Foggy, staring at his-- safe, alive, _awake_ \-- friend, nearly did an encore for her. He talked instead.

"You're a goddamn _asshole_ , Matt."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I saw that day, lost my mind._  
>  Gorillaz


	13. follow the leader

"...Foggy, sorry."

"Get the hell down from there. Jesus. You'll give me a coronary one of these days."

Foggy leaned against the truck with a muffled grumble, lightheaded. Blood loss. He _loved it_. His leg was agony, but he was pretty sure it was going to be in the middle of that spectrum for a long-ass time. He could feel the rough, uneven pattern of the stitches and knew he'd probably have to re-do them. Karen was right-- she sucked ass at putting them in.

Matt eased himself into the tailbed. He was trembling all over, not just in his arm, and Foggy could see in his uneven movements that he was still shaking off the drugs. He was so pale. "Coronary, what is this?" His voice was frail. Ugh, he needed to get off of the damned truck and out of the cold a goddamn hour ago.

Fucking Karen. "My heart's gonna stop and it'll be your fault."

Matt paused in the middle of the tailbed with a look of horror on his bloodless face.

"Oh my God. It was a joke. I'm joking, Matt, you're not gonna make my heart stop." Foggy groaned, waving for him to come over. "Get inside before you freeze your nuts off."

"Not joke." Matt tried to glare at him, but ended up pointing his gaze at an overturned dumpster instead. "Foggy, not good."

"Jeez. I didn't mean it, all right?" He'd just been scolded by a man with less words in his vocabulary than there were living people on the planet. Foggy supposed that meant he actually _had_ fucked up. "Sorry, man. Come on."

Matt didn't climb out of the tailbed, and jerked his head marginally, frowning. He twisted one of the strings of his hoodie in his good hand. "Can... _I_ can, um, stay here? Out--out--outside... here?"

"Um, no, it's way too cold. You don't even have shoes." Foggy grabbed Matt's hand gently to guide him down to the street, but only got resistance. He opened his mouth to ask why, but then he remembered Karen sitting silently in the front seat, and stopped. Obvious. "You're scared of her?"

Matt bowed his head and didn't answer.

Foggy looked over at her, then back to his friend. "She won't hurt you, buddy. It's okay."

He got a soft, low noise as a reply, that time. It came quiet from the back of Matt's throat, not quite a whine, not quite a grunt. One that Foggy hadn't heard much of, and had yet to catalog. Matt climbed out of the tailbed, at least, dropping himself gingerly to the dust, then frowned and took Foggy's hand, guiding it to his shoulder, then his collarbone. He didn't lift his head.

"You got hurt?"

Matt's gaze was glued to the ground.

"Okay, buddy. It's okay. Let me see it."

Foggy leaned in close, searching, but all he found was a tiny spot. It took him way too many seconds to figure it out. A prick left by a needle.

Fuck. He _remembered her shooting him_. Foggy had been so sure the drugs would wipe the memory from his head, like the ketamine would have. He rubbed his thumb over the little imperfection, sighing.

"I know she did that to you. I won't let her do it again." He nearly tossed a glare at her over his shoulder, knowing she could hear him, but thought better of it and kept his face and attention turned to his friend.

Matt's voice was very soft. "Hurts."

"I know it does." Not physically. Foggy knew better than that. "You'll be okay. You trust me, don't you?"

The response was immediate. "Foggy, yes."

"Then trust that I won't let anything happen to you. Not while I'm here. Got it?"

Matt did not look like he got it at all. He huffed out a long sigh anyway, and mumbled a faint 'Yes' before slipping past Foggy, trailing his fingers down the length of the truck and along the doorframe before climbing inside. Keeping his face carefully turned away from Karen, he pushed himself down the seat and curled up tight against the opposite door.

She didn't do anything but watch him closely, and he pulled himself tighter as if sensing her scrutiny.

Foggy frowned and shut the door to the back cab. When he got to the driver's seat, Karen was already moving to sit there.

"Your leg," she said, glaring at the odometer. "I'll drive us back."

Foggy had a rebuttal ready for her, but he knew she was right, and groaned instead of saying anything.

"Sit with him," Karen jammed a thumb over her shoulder. "You, uh. You scared him. When you passed out." She still wouldn't look at anything but the dashboard, and her voice started to pitch lower. "He was, uh. ...Crying."

"Yeah... he does that."

"I tried to..." she stopped, aborted the sentence with a sigh. Started again, slowly, "...He took off when I went back to help you. Pretty sure he puked in the alley somewhere." She was trying very hard to force her voice into that emotionless mumble, but she was failing. "I didn't know what to do."

Foggy sighed. "Okay, well." He tapped the truck's door and turned back to the rear cab. "At least you didn't shoot him again." That was progress, he supposed.

Karen drew in a sharp breath as if she'd made to say something, but he opened the door and climbed inside, ignoring whatever it would have been. His leg felt like it was temporarily on fire as he stretched the muscle, and that wasn't good, but fuck, whatever. Foggy settled himself down gently, wincing, then slid over to where Matt was hiding in his silent and shivering ball.

"Hey, buddy." He patted Matt's shoulder. "How you doing?"

"Feels." His face was pushed into his knees, muffling his words. "Feels bad."

"I bet. Heard you upchucked in the alleyway."

"Foggy, threw up."

It looked like he hadn't eaten it, at least.  "Yeah. You got hit pretty hard with that stuff." He heard Karen putting the keys in the ignition before the engine rumbled to life. "Come on, buddy, get outta that ball. It'll make your leg hurt worse." He tugged at Matt's arm, trying to uncurl him.

Matt started to do as Foggy asked, but then the truck jerked forward and he pulled his hand back to brace it against the car door. His eyes flicked around slowly-- was he remembering something, or looking for something?-- and he sagged with a soft grunt. "Don't want, Foggy."

"Don't want what?"

He twisted his mouth and patted the door next to him with his shivering hand.

"You don't want to be in the truck?"

"Truck," Matt repeated, latching onto the word he knew he'd been looking for. "No. Foggy." He blinked, removing his hand from the door, unable to control his shivering. "Sh... s..." he huffed, and paused for a minute, eyes flicking around, but he couldn't find what he was looking for. His expression crumpled in frustration, and he chewed on his bottom lip before holding out his left arm and gesturing to it. "This."

Foggy figured it out in half a second. "Shaking? From the truck?"

"Yes. Foggy. Shaking." He repeated the word in that disconnected way he did, categorizing it one syllable at a time in his sluggish head. " _Sha_ king, sha _king_."

"I know, it shakes a lot. But it's so much faster than walking, man, and a lot safer."

Matt huffed. "Feels bad."

"I know you hate cars. Just tell me when you're gonna throw up, and I'll have Karen pull over." Foggy didn't look for confirmation from her. He had a feeling she would do it.

For a few seconds, Matt stared blearily at the floor in silence, and then he turned and burrowed his face in Foggy's neck, gentle and hesitant. His skin was still cold. "Don't _want_."

Foggy wrapped an arm around him and tugged him close. God, he was cold all over. "Man, who _does_ want?" The truck jolted as Karen ran something over and Matt grumbled into his neck. "Hey, it's not a demolition derby, Paige. Christ."

"I'm _trying_ ," she hissed, keeping her eyes on the road.

"Home, Foggy," Matt murmured in his ear. "Home."

"That's where we're going, Matty. The shelter. It got attacked last night, do you... do you remember any of that?"

"...No."

So he'd been drugged before the aliens showed up. Foggy figured he should probably thank Karen later for her unintentional hand in saving Matt's life, preventing him from getting slaughtered by an alien. There wasn't much of anything besides drugs that could stop him from seeking out a threat whenever one appeared.

"Matty, the shelter... it might not be there anymore. Aliens attacked it last night. You understand?"

"Home," Matt whined again, ignoring the question, the word falling warm against Foggy's neck. He was terrible at controlling his volume, but he still managed to drop his voice to a soft hiss. "No Karen. Don't want. Not... n- _not_."

"Hey. Hey, listen to me. I won't let her hurt you, okay?" Foggy kept his voice low, but glanced over at Karen as she stiffened. He knew she could hear them. "Paige. Tell him."

"...Tell him what?" She was trying to sound innocent. Impossible, because she barely sounded like anything right now.

"You _know_ what."

A loud, hissing sigh left her mouth, worming out tight between her teeth. "I won't mess with you, Matt, okay?" He flinched the second his name left her mouth. It made Foggy want to scream. "I won't... I won't hurt you." It was the first time she'd ever talked to him without fury in her tone or a weapon in her hands.

It did very little to help. Matt stayed silent, face hidden in Foggy's neck, body rigid and still, like he was afraid she'd hurt him if he moved. Jesus. Maybe she shouldn't have been invited along. Foggy sighed and pulled him tighter, speaking quietly. "It's all right, buddy. It's gonna be okay."

Matt didn't budge.

Karen's eyes caught Foggy's in the rear-view, and he held them, unsure what was on his face, unsure what was on hers. A wide gulf of silence stretched back between them, and goddamn was Foggy sick of paddling across it just for Karen's blank stares and walled-off words.

He turned his head and gazed out the window instead. They were moving alongside the Hudson, still on the east side. The sun peered up over the skeletal remains across the river, a hazy brown-green light pouring through the dust, staining the river as ash-black as it could get. Some of the buildings he thought he could recognize, just from their bones, but when he tried to bring up the names, he just felt sick. It was quiet. He couldn't see anything moving, anywhere. Even the river seemed frozen in time.

Matt curled his fingers in Foggy's shirt, his thumb idly rubbing along one of the many imperfect threads. There was sweat between their skin and Foggy knew he was nauseated. He'd always fucking hated being in big cars, buses, subway trains. They bounced him around too much and gave off too many vibrations. _It's disorienting_ , Matt had said, back when the world was whole and he still had all his pieces. _Come on, let's just call a taxi. We'll go Dutch._

God, Foggy missed him.

He sighed and tapped his fingers on the back of Matt's hand. "You gonna puke?"

"Mmn. No."

"You sure?"

"Yes," Matt breathed, but he definitely looked like he was about to. He swallowed heavily and started a whine, but he bit it back immediately, as if he knew Karen would not like the sound.

It was really not fucking fair at all.

"Just a while longer," Foggy said, ignoring Karen as she turned her head to check on them. "A little while longer."

\---

It was another half-hour before they came up over a gentle hill and returned to the burnt edge of Central Park, where the shelter had sat.

_Had_.

"Jesus Christ," Foggy breathed from the backseat. "Christ, there's nothing left."

It rose out of the mud only as splinters and crumbling chunks of sheetrock. The electric fence was down, ripped apart and twisted along the ground and around the site like a discarded ribbon. Something was still burning around the west side, faint smoke drifting up lazily into the air.

Karen turned onto the muddy road. Her hands were shivering on the wheel.

Foggy shifted himself down the seat carefully, to get to the opposite window, and Matt jolted and hurried to follow. He didn't stuff his face back in Foggy's neck, only kept his head bowed, fiddling with one of his sleeves.

The shelter was so trampled and torn apart that Foggy could scarcely believe there used to be a building standing there. Not a single scrap of it that lay on the ground rose higher than four or five feet. He couldn't believe he used to live there.

Karen turned the wheel and sidled the truck up next to the crumpled fence. The section of the gate that Foggy had driven through was still laying twisted off to the side. She put the vehicle in park, and let out a slow breath, rubbing her face.

Foggy kept staring. "God Almighty." A slur he'd pick up off of Matt, who didn't recognize it anymore.

"Well. Let's go," Karen breathed, leaning into the door and pushing it open. A mixed smell of burnt plastic and stretched rubber bands and the decayed scent of the river rushed inside the cab. She moved carefully, wincing when her arms went too far and tugged at the stitches. For a few seconds, she turned toward Foggy's door, as if to open it for him and help him out, but then her face hardened and she turned away and started toward the ruin.

"Okay, buddy," Foggy whispered, finally dragging his gaze away. He hooked his hand gently around Matt's neck and tugged him along the seat. "Careful getting out. It's a little high up."

He opened the door and climbed out, left leg first, the other following slowly, a sharp hiss blasting through his teeth when it touched the ground. When he inhaled afterward, he regretted it, because the fucking _stench_ pushed into him like a physical thing. A bitter tang, burnt ozone, the smell that those fucking aliens always left behind. He was used to only stepping into the aftermath of _one_ of them. There had been far more here, and the smell was cloying, heady, like he was being forced to inhale something solid.

Foggy turned back to help Matt out, and as soon as his feet hit the ground, Matt jerked away from him and immediately heaved out bile and foam next to the rear tire. His shuddering fingers gripped tightly to the top of the tailbed and Foggy grabbed his other arm to stop him from tipping into the mud. It was hard to tell if the truck or the smell had made him ill. Both, probably.

"Hey, at least you made it outside," Foggy said, trying to be humorous. It was impossible with the expanse of crushed lives laying behind them, and his voice only came out flat and strained. He waited until Matt stopped heaving and lifted his shivering head before talking to him again. "You okay, bud?"

"Fog. Not good."

"I know."

"Not _good_ ," Matt reiterated, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm. He was tilting his head around, listening, shoulders stiff. "Foggy, not good, not good."

"I _know_ that, buddy. Maybe you can ride in the front seat next time. That might help."

Matt blinked slowly, eyes rolling in some weak imitation of impatience. "Foggy, no. Not-- not-- not the tr--ruck." He swallowed again, straightening up, shivering all over. " _Not_ safe," he said, and then, more urgently, grabbing Foggy's arm with clumsy fingers, "...leave. Not safe."

Foggy stilled. "They're still nearby?"

"Smells," Matt said, turning half toward him, uneven on his feet. His head shivered as he lifted it and his hand twitched against Foggy's arm as he tried to push him back toward the truck. He was so weak that it hurt. "Foggy, not safe, not good. Leave."

Fuck, what if they'd been waiting? What if they'd come from behind and cornered them here? They'd been too brave, having sunlight on their side. It figured that the aliens would find some way past it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He grabbed Matt's elbow, speaking both as fast and slow as he dared, because Matt needed to hear him, but he also had to be able to understand him. "Okay, Matty, you need to tell me where they are, but you can't do it from in the truck. Where are they, Matt? Can you hear them? Concentrate." He heard footsteps behind him and turned his head. It was Karen, looking paler than before, and he halted her with a shake of his hand.

Matt leaned into the truck, head tilting around as he sought out noises too faint for anyone else to hear. He blinked slowly and chewed at his lip. He swayed on his feet, then shook his head. "Can't, Foggy."

God, the fucking drugs. Perfect. Foggy knew it fucked up his senses, but had only assumed that it messed with his balance and spatial awareness, and prayed it hadn't extended to his hearing. He should have known. Prayer hadn't and wouldn't ever work for them, or for anyone. Foggy put a hand on Matt's shoulder instead, giving him a gentle shake. "You _can_. Focus, Matt. _Listen_."

Huffing out a pained breath, Matt licked his lips and tried again. His eyes darted around Foggy's feet, flicked up near the truck as he tilted his head sharply in the other direction. Foggy didn't dare to move or speak, because he had no idea how far out Matt was actually trying to stretch himself. Sometimes, before the virus, he would go so far, let it in so deeply, that all other external input became walled off. Could Matt even do that anymore?

Karen was moving again, and Foggy felt his face twist in anger as he whirled his head round and glared at her. He stilled her with a wave of his hand, and pointed to her feet, mouthing, _'Stay there,'_ as clearly as he could. Even if she couldn't read facial expressions, he knew she could still read lips.

Matt's eyes were fixed somewhere around Foggy's shoulder, head twitching minutely now, little fractions of movement. His expression was still and silent. It had been so long since Foggy had seen such total concentration on his face-- it was almost like he was looking at the old Matt again, back on the roof of their apartment. This was going to wear him the hell out, Foggy knew, when he could barely stand on his own two feet in the first place.

Karen opened her damned mouth. "Is he o--"

"Shh! Shut _up_ ," he hissed at her. "He's listening."

Matt didn't respond to either of them; he'd buried himself too deep into whatever he was hearing. It was frightening-- it looked like he was sedated again, only upright and conscious this time. Eyes fixed, face blank.

Another couple minutes passed in silence, and then Matt blinked rapidly, sagging against the side of the truck as he came back to their world. He shook his head as much as he could to try to shake off the disorientation-- from the drugs and the sudden input pouring into his hearing. Foggy was glad he knew about all of this, because Matt looked like he was about to have a fucking seizure or just straight-up drop dead. If Karen's softly quickening breathing behind him was any indication, she thought so, too.

Of course she didn't want him to drop dead. Not now, not that she had a use for him.

Foggy rubbed his thumb carefully on Matt's upper arm, and smiled weakly as it drew his attention, and he focused. "Matty. You hear me?"

"Ngh. ...Yes."

"Where are they?"

Matt licked his lips again, letting out a breath. "There," he said, gesturing past Foggy-- south, into the trees.

"In the Park?"

"N-no." He worked his jaw, looked through his head for a long moment, and ended up chuffing out a heavy, frustrated noise. "They... ugh. W-word."

Foggy assumed that they weren't anywhere nearby, otherwise Matt would either be shoving him bodily into the truck or running off to get himself murdered. "It's okay. Tell me more, we'll figure it out."

"It..." Matt rubbed his face, huffing out a breath, then leaned harder into the truck to make a motion with his hands. The right one he lined up flat, then drummed the fingers of his left shakily beneath his palm. He was mapping out the shape for Foggy-- at least how he saw it in his head.

"Uh." Jesus, he sucked at charades. So did Matt. "Um, street?"

Matt shook his head and repeated the motion, chewing on his bottom lip.

"Underground," Karen said from a few meters away.

Hearing her voice, Matt's entire demeanor changed in a split-second. He flinched and stepped closer to Foggy, who once again had to turn his head to fire silent anger at her. Karen's face twitched and she mirrored what Matt had done, staring at her feet. Foggy wished that she wasn't so blind to see how fucking much she had in common with him.

Foggy was about to go for her with a sharp order or a simple Fuck off, but was stopped by Matt breathing a quiet, "Yes. Underground." It was a long word and it took him a few seconds to get it out of his mouth. Karen sighed behind them.

"Right, okay, underground," Foggy said, ignoring her. "Where? The subway? The subway tunnels?"

Matt's response was a very quiet, "Yes."

"Okay, Matty." He shook Matt's arm to take his attention off of Karen. It worked. "The subway tunnels? That's where they went?"

"...Yes." It was faint.

"Are they still there?"

"Yes."

"How many, Matt?" He regretted the question as soon as he asked it. How the fuck was Matt supposed to know? Foggy searched his mind for some way around it, and ended up twisting his mouth and placing his hand in Matt's, palm upward. "Feel my fingers, buddy."

Matt's brow knit, but he did as asked, skating the ball of his thumb across the ends of Foggy's fingernails.

"There. Feel them? Good. Okay, for each one you heard, close one of my fingers. Like this." He took Matt's hand and guided it into the movement he wanted. "Can you do that? Do you remember how many you heard?"

"Yes, Foggy." His voice was a bit stronger, now. Foggy imagined that he could hear pride there. Matt hummed under his breath and flitted his eyes around as he searched through his ruined head, all splinters and crumbling chunks of sheetrock sticking out of mud. Gently, he started bending Foggy's fingers.

One, two, three, four, five. Matt ran out of fingers.

Foggy gave him his other hand. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten-- Matt bent all of them. Another hand, and he bent all of them. Another, and he stopped at two. Seventeen.

_Seventeen._

"Jesus Christ," Foggy breathed, and he was sure he heard something similar behind him, from Karen.

"A lot," Matt said.

"God. All in the subway? Underground, Matt?"

"Yes."

"Are there any out here? Near us?"

Matt twitched his head in a shake, still holding Foggy's hand, trailing his fingernails along a scar on Foggy's palm. "All underg... under _ground_."

"God. Okay. We gotta... we gotta grab as much as we can before they come back." Foggy gently dropped his hands, then turned back to the shelter. Its appearance stilled him again, and for a brief second, he wished that he was blind, so he wouldn't have to fucking see it. Matt could smell it, though, and smelling it was probably a hundred times worse. "Keep listening, Matty. Listen for them. If you hear anything close, you gotta tell us."

"Tell Foggy," Matt said with a huff.

"As long as you tell _someone_ ," Foggy said, giving Karen a frail attempt at an amused look that must have fallen flat, because she just gave him that blank stare in return. Whatever. He started toward the crushed expanse of building, favoring his leg and gritting his teeth as the pain flared whenever he put it down. Matt was right behind him, walking easier but still struggling not to sway.

"I need your help still, Matty," he said, stepping over the twisted fence slowly, ignoring the thrum of pained blood in his leg. "Can you? Do you feel okay?"

"Okay," Matt mumbled, climbing over the chain-link. He was hurrying, trying to get away from Karen as quickly as possible. "Help. I want to." No, he just wanted to put as much distance between him and her as he could.

"Great, buddy." Foggy stepped into the perimeter of shattered glass and wood, dust and broken furniture and torn fabric that was the shelter. "Wait there a second. You need... shit, you need something on your feet." Yeah, make your friend that's struggling with an infected knee wound and too much sedatives tap-dance all over a bunch of broken glass and nails. Idiot. "Matty, stay here."

It took way too long to find a pair of fucking shoes and bring them back. Matt stood right where he'd been left, just as asked, listening intently to the woods around them. Foggy couldn't see where Karen had gone.

"Here, put these on." He placed the shoes in Matt's hands. Just a shitty pair of trainers. Hopefully the last owner didn't have a fungal infection, although he suspected they'd been Jack's. "You remember how?"

"Um." Matt rolled them in his hands, ran his thumbs alongside the soles. "Um... yes." He sounded surprised, and blinked in bewilderment at himself as he sat down on a leaning door to put them on. They were a little big. Foggy would find some more later. Right now, the schedule was a little tight.

"Okay. Careful of the-- nevermind." Foggy shut his mouth as Matt stepped lightly through the splinters and the glass, barely touching any of it, keeping his head tilted. It looked goddamn supernatural. It always did. "I'll go through the infirmary, buddy, but I need you to look for food."

Matt's attention was caught immediately. "Food?"

"Yeah. Can you find some? Can you get all the stuff that's still good?"

"Yes." There was no way Matt could be hungry. He'd been doing nothing but pulling himself out of sedation and vomiting everywhere. Then again, Foggy wasn't feral. The virus had certainly fucked with Matt's drug metabolism, it wasn't much of a stretch that it had dicked around with his digestive tract, as well.

Ugh, didn't matter. Foggy turned away and picked his way carefully through what he thought must have been the hall to the infirmary. Matt hesitated for a few moments before breaking from his side and heading in the direction of the kitchen, even though he'd never been there.

Every wall that had once held up the building had fallen inward, and there was still dried blood on the linoleum where they'd dragged Jack inside. Had that really happened? All of it-- all of the previous night and day-- sort of just smeared together into one grey-streaked, awful memory.

Foggy puffed out a breath and shoved a few leaning pieces of drywall out of the way near the infirmary door. His bags were still there. Lucky-- they hadn't been snatched up or burnt to ash. He bent slowly at his back to pick them up, not trusting his leg. He wondered if Matt did the same thing for his less-than-useful limbs. Maybe he could get pointers.

He hobbled his way back a few meters to set the bags on a more level surface-- a door supported by a pile of splinters and fuzzy pink wall insulation. It was an odd flash of bright color in their greying world.

So: his medical bag, with the rudimentary first aid kit, Matt's sedatives, the notebook, the other random shit that Foggy had brought from the apartment and kept to himself. Stupid shit. He set it next to the stuff he'd dug out of the infirmary with the intent to steal it. Was it still stealing if everyone was fucking slaughtered?

Foggy moved back to the infirmary, slipping carefully underneath the bent door. It was a goddamn mess inside. The tables were overturned, cabinets thrown to the floor, the cheap plastic sink shattered with its pieces tossed across the linoleum.

Jack was there too, on the floor, half-wrapped in the blanket. Foggy pushed the blanket with the tip of his foot to cover him back up. There was something torn and twisted and bloodied next to him. Another body. Brian. Foggy wasn't sure why he was there. He should have run. Maybe he'd gone back, panicked and terrified, to be with his friend one last time before he died.

Maybe Foggy should have thought about more than himself for two goddamn seconds and taken Brian with him.

His stomach rolled, but there was nothing inside of it to throw up. He moved as quickly as he could, turning his face away, pushing aside a buckled wall of sheetrock to get to the drug cabinet. There was liquid pooling on the floor and he bit back a groan as he saw why. Something had smashed the cabinet and tossed out everything inside, leaving an uneven carpet of shattered vials and crushed bottles of pills all over the floor.

"Perfect," he mumbled. The nausea pooled beneath his sternum and dug at the back of his tongue. "That's just so fucking perfect."

Foggy tried to kneel to go through it, but his leg bit viciously into his brain's pain center the second he tried to bend his knees. He stopped himself. Everything was smashed, anyway. Most of the pills had turned to mush in the smeared pools of liquid. Even if he could identify all of them, they'd be worthless, and tainted with God-knows-what spread all over the floor.

He edged carefully around the two bodies on the floor, trying not to think about them, so of course he thought about them, and wondered where Deborah had gone, and why he hadn't brought them with him to safety, and he got two steps past what used to be the infirmary door before vomiting. Well, actually, he was just heaving nothing but spit into his own mouth. There wasn't anything in him anymore. He wasn't sure he deserved it anyway.

God, he was selfish. It wasn't fair. He should have brought them. They would have fit in the back. He could have explained Matt to them. Hell, Matt had been knocked goddamn senseless from the tranquilizer, he could have lied about him being feral and he would have gotten away with it.

His stomach clenched painfully and it made an awful sensation leap up in his chest. He leaned against the broken infirmary door and his leg buckled, sliding him down to a sitting position, face in his hands. Stupid selfish idiot.

There was a soft crash a few feet away and he jumped. Matt tumbled around the corner, nearly stabbing himself on a long splinter that jutted out of a collapsed wall. There was worry on his face and a pile of shit in his arms. Of course he'd heard Foggy gagging and come running, that's what Matt always did. "Foggy, okay?"

"Jesus, slow down. I'm fine." He didn't like that his voice cracked. He didn't like that there was that hot and burning pain in the corners of his eyes.

Matt didn't slow down; he hurried to Foggy's side and hummed. "Puke."

"No shit. This is fucked up, Matt."

"Fucked up."

"Don't repe-- _God_ , fuck it." He wiped his mouth, ignoring the perplexed look on his friend's face. His leg felt pretty awful. Probably wasn't the best idea to flop down on the floor, but he was a goddamned idiot, so whatever, it made sense. "Help me outta here, Matty."

Matt set everything aside and took Foggy's hand, and without being guided or told to, he looped Foggy's arm over his shoulders, and helped him up. Even with all his slim margins and broken edges, Matt could still lift him. Far stronger than Foggy would ever be, even with the tremors, even after the sedatives, even as pale and shaky as a piece of fucking paper. Foggy leaned into him and wished, again, that he had that sort of strength in himself.

Huffing, Matt guided him out of the pile of useless pieces that their temporary home had been permanently turned into and set him down on an overturned barrel marked 'GAS' that, of course, was hollow. Damn.

"Foggy, okay?" Matt asked again, with a heavy tug of air into his chest, swaying once before catching himself and straightening up. They were all fucked up. God.

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm okay." Foggy rubbed his face, settled his hands on the back of his neck. "There's just... there's bodies." He didn't have fucking time to cry, but his eyes were burning so _much._

"Hn." Matt tilted his head. "A lot. Bodies."

"Yeah, I know. Did you find any food?"

"Foggy, yes." Matt turned and went back to grab the things he'd gathered up. It was all wrapped in a blanket that he set down on the ground and opened up. "Um. The word? No... Nood..."

Foggy lifted his head heavily to look. "Noodles, Matt." Even to himself, his voice sounded dead. God, he was so fucking tired.

"Noodles. Yes. A lot."

"I can see that."

Shit, it was _all_ Matt could find. Foggy supposed they could eat it dry, but they still needed water, at any rate. They'd have to look for something else, soon. So much for giving Matt time to rest and stop his knee from getting worse. This wasn't like the apartment, they didn't have anything stashed away, and definitely not enough to last any considerable length of time. Worthless.

Foggy started a mental inventory. _Medical supplies. Noodles_. It was a start, and more than they'd had when they got here. He leaned forward, burying his head in his hands again. Jesus, he needed to _move_. There wasn't _time_ for this shit.

He didn't move. His leg throbbed and he was afraid if he got up, he'd pass out again, and that'd be ten times worse.

Matt shifted on his feet in front of him. There was a frown in his voice, and it made his soft words come out heavy and strained. "Foggy. Um. Not good? More?"

"No, Matt, it's not you, it's--"

But he'd already made up his mind, and brushed a feathery touch along Foggy's shoulder before moving back into the pile of splinters and glass. Foggy kept his face in his hands and didn't budge. There was hot warmth on his palms and he knew it wasn't blood. At least he could get away with blood. He could _fix_ blood.

Footsteps behind him, quiet and soft.

"Go away, Paige," he hissed into his hands, refusing to move them from his face.

"...No," she said, and he heard her step up next to him. And there was the uncomfortable silence, flooding in black and empty between them, like the fucking Atlantic. Her clothes ruffled like she was trying to cross her arms, but he knew she couldn't.

Something landed on the barrel next to him, and he jolted, finally pulling his hands away to look. A jacket.

"For Matt," she said, and both words sounded like they'd been dredged from the center of the goddamn earth. She made no comment regarding his crying. "It's cold."

Foggy sighed, tugging it into his lap. "...Thanks."

Karen grunted. "...So, Deborah's truck is gone. I can't find her in the b... in there." She gestured, uselessly, to the remains of the building. "Maybe she got away."

That scream she'd made played back in Foggy's head, over and over. He'd heard the pain in it, the terror. Tattooed permanently into his brain, right alongside the image of Matt trying to bite his face off on the roof of the apartment.

Foggy crushed his hopes to the ground instead of letting them get up. He rubbed his face, shoved the tears from his eyes with the heels of his hands, then continued on until his fingers were digging into the nape of his neck. A sigh left his chest that rattled through his throat and got caught behind his teeth. "Guess you'll have to ride with us, then. Sorry, I know it's not... it's not _ideal_."

"Shut up," she mumbled. He heard her breathe carefully before she spoke again, a little louder, a little stronger. "Don't blame yourself for this shit."

That stupid fucking heat rushed back into his eyes. "We could have taken them with us," he said at length, and his voice cracked, and he fucking _hated it_ and _himself_ and this _stupid fucking fucked-up world they were all bound and trapped in_. "We could have saved them."

"Can't change what's already happened," Karen said, putting her hands in her pants pockets. She was wearing a new shirt, but the same jacket. She'd found a knit cap somewhere and had tucked her hair underneath. It made the sharp angles of her jaw and face appear even more severe.

"Oh, you're the one comforting me now? No, thanks. I'd rather listen to Matt prattle nonsense some more." He really fucking would. At least that shit was familiar.

She made a huffing noise, ignoring his irritation. "I still have that tranquilizer gun, if that's what you really want." Her voice was dull as a tree log, but something was stirring beneath the words. A weak attempt at humor for their shitty situation. Foggy only knew that because he did the same thing.

It made him drop his hands and look up at her, anyway. She looked back at him. Some molecules were shifting at the corner of her lips. Just one or two. "...Was that a joke?" he asked.

Karen shrugged, and hid her wince. From pain or embarrassment, he couldn't tell. "Yeah. I tried."

Foggy tried to frown, but he was also trying very hard to smile, so his expression stayed frozen in place instead of choosing to be one or the other. "You suck at it."

"...Out of practice," she mumbled, shifting her gaze from him to stare at the shelter.

"You don't really have the tranquilizer gun, do you?"

"I do."

His expression finally stopped waffling and ended up in a hard frown. _Throw it away_ , was what he wanted to tell her. _Toss it in the river. I never want to see it. I never want to find Matt like that again_.

"Hold onto it," he said.

"Just in case?"

"...Just in case," Foggy mumbled. He turned his head, letting his eyes wander over the splinters and busted walls. Matt was hunkered down near their room, or somewhere in that general area, digging around for something. Still, Foggy didn't want to get up. His leg was fucking awful and he just wanted to sleep for days. Or forever. "...Sorry. We don't have time for this bullshit. I know."

"Well... there's not a whole lot here." She swayed a little, and it caught his attention.

Foggy shifted over on the barrel to give her space to sit. It took her a long minute to decide to do it, but she let out a soft sigh when she was off of her feet. "What's left?" he asked, ignoring her closeness.

She did the same for him. "The purifier's busted, so that's useless. I helped Eric put it together, though, so we could build another one. With the right parts."

"'We'?" he repeated, raising an eyebrow sluggishly. It felt like it weighed fifty pounds.

Karen didn't respond to the question. She sat with her back straight so that her position wouldn't pull at the wounds, and kept talking. "I found some guns in good shape. Bullets. Not a lot, but some. There's a few barrels on the other side, we were using them for water storage... there's some water still in them, so we can take those."

Foggy tentatively checked _water_ off of his mental grocery list. _Medical supplies. Noodles, guns, water._ "I got a bunch of medical shit. The infirmary got torn to hell, but there was... I had some things set aside." To steal, of course, but she didn't need to know that.

_Medical supplies. Noodles, guns, water._

Karen knocked on the barrel they were sitting on. "This one's empty, but there's another one in the... where the garage used to be. It'll get us out of the area, at least." Listening to her soft, dead voice for so long made it sound almost alive. Almost. "I got blankets from my room. You should get the ones out of yours, we'll need them."

"Are we going to live in the truck?"

"Where else is there?"

Foggy gestured to the bare outline of the city around them. "Well, there's a couple of buildings there, if you haven't noticed."

That clump of molecules at the edge of her mouth twitched again. "We shouldn't stay in the city. Ferals everywhere. I think we..." she sighed quietly, "...I think the best plan is to head south. Brooklyn. Eric has a place there."

" _Had_."

"Had," she repeated, and the word was weak. Her next ones were stronger. "There's more supplies there. Something to tide us over. Until spring."

"Spring?" Foggy scoffed. "You're planning on staying with us that long?"

Karen shrugged again, winced again. "I don't know."

At least she was honest. "Well, it's a start. Has it got running water?"

"There's a purifier, yes."

"Awesome." There was actual life in his voice that time. _Medical supplies. Noodles, guns, water. A place to stay._ Okay, maybe this was getting a bit more doable. "Uh, so I gotta... I gotta ask you something."

He felt her stiffen next to him. "Yeah?"

"So, the, uh, virus." Foggy waved uselessly in Matt's direction. "Eric. When that happened. He didn't bite you, did he?"

Her voice moved out of her throat with great care. "No. He didn't."

"...But you've had sex with him."

"It's not transmitted that way," she said, folding her hands together, hanging them between her knees. She tightened her fingers but could not hide the nervous shake in them.

"Are you sure?"

Karen's voice fell, and became almost too quiet to hear. "...I'm sure."

There was something in the curve of her body that told Foggy to stop asking questions. He did. "All right."

Uncomfortable silence again, stretching that rift between them, until Matt came limping out of the ruin with a blanket full of shit hauled over his shoulder. He halted a few meters away from them, worrying at his bottom lip. Karen, of course.

Foggy waved him over and fought off the vertigo from his own sudden movement. "What'd you get?"

"Um." Matt shifted on his feet again, head hanging. He moved closer, keeping Foggy between him and her. "Not, um. A lot. Food." Jesus, his nerves were making him hard to understand. More than usual.

Thank fuck Karen had some tact, because she got to her feet and gave them some space. Foggy looked at her, hoping that there was some kind of appreciation in his expression. It was hard to get anything past that hard edge of tears that were still trying to get the hell out of his eyes.

Matt slipped closer and put the mess down next to Foggy's feet, and Foggy started going through it. More noodles, of course, some boxes of pasta. Blankets from their room, including the soft one that Matt always hogged, folded carefully at the bottom of the pile and wrapped around something silver. Foggy dug it out and brought it into the light.

He made a soft noise. "...Shit, man, I'm sorry," he said, holding it in his hands. The CD player. It looked like it'd been stepped on. The top was bent inward and it wouldn't close anymore. "That sucks. I'll look for another one for you, okay, buddy?"

"...Okay." He sounded pretty devastated, and looked even worse. The shivering and him being pale as a fucking sheet wasn't helping at all.

"Still. You got blankets. That's good."

"Mm."

_Medical supplies. Noodles, guns, water. A place to stay. Blankets. Matt._

"Oh, yeah." Foggy handed out the jacket from his lap. "Here, put this on."

Matt took it, turned it over in his hands, ran his fingers along the zipper. His eyebrows moved into that crumpled, confused expression.

"It's a jacket. Put it on, you'll be warmer."

"Hn." He still looked fairly bewildered, but did what he was told. It was a little big, but so was the damn hoodie. Immediately, he started fiddling with the zipper. Good, something for him to fidget with that didn't involve his teeth digging into his own fingers. "Mm. Thank, thank you. Foggy."

"...Actually, Karen got that for you."

Matt stilled at that, his expression slipping directly into that soft, frightened look that he always pointed at his feet. Still, he tilted his head in Karen's direction and mumbled a fragmented, "Thank you. Karen." He was trying hard to make the words sound normal, especially her name, but everything still came out with the syllables isolated from each other. It was too hard for him.

She didn't respond. Foggy wasn't sure what was worse. He held a hand out toward Matt. "Help me again, buddy?"

"Yes." Matt took his hand and hauled him back to his feet. How the fuck was he still so strong, after three months of starvation and too much sedative and the fucking virus burning him from the inside out? He still looked like he might pass out any second. "Foggy... okay?"

"I'm okay. My leg hurts."

"Mm."

"All right, let's... let's grab our shit, get the fuck out of here. Can you hear anything nearby?"

Matt paused a minute, then twitched his head in a 'no'.

"Cool. Come on."

Foggy gathered as much as he could and Matt grabbed the blankets with the food wrapped inside. After a few moments, Karen followed, keeping space between them. Matt kept his head tilted in her direction, chewing at his lip again, as if expecting her to run up and attack him from behind. She didn't.

They piled the shit into the truck, drove the truck to the barrels, rolled them around and heaved them into the tailbed. Luckily (unluckily), they were each only about half-full. Half-empty. Whatever.

Foggy sighed as they loaded the last one up. _Medical supplies. Noodles, guns, water. A place to stay. Blankets. Matt. Gasoline._ He needed a notebook, or a copy of a Hustler. Someone had to keep all their shit straight.

He climbed into the backseat and sat next to Matt, who was already curled up and frowning against the door. If he wasn't so zoned out from the drugs, he'd probably be brooding.

_Medical supplies. Noodles, guns, water. A place to stay. Blankets. Matt. Gasoline._

The truck's engine rumbled as it turned over.

_Karen._

\---

They gave a wide berth to the subway stations, and meandered slowly along the edge of the river. Foggy stared out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of their old apartment through the rest of the crumbled buildings and dust. He couldn't find it. Just another pile of shit in the giant pile of shit that the city had become. His mind buzzed with exhaustion and guilt and his eyes started shutting without his permission.

He started dozing somewhere near 39th, head on Matt's shoulder, and Matt leaning into him, silent, with a shuddering hand on his arm. Karen didn't talk, but she did manage to keep the truck to the clear roads, the ones with fewer potholes, so that they wouldn't shudder and shake so much in the backseat. That was what he wanted to believe, anyway.

Foggy was trying to keep his eyes open. He really was. When he tried to think of how long he'd been awake, he couldn't do the simple math to add the hours together, and he knew that probably meant he shouldn't be trying to stay awake anymore.

Matt was shivering, pale, sweating from nausea, but still pulled Foggy close, letting him lean on him even as he himself leaned into the truck's door. "Sleep, Foggy," he whispered, worry in his voice. Even Matt, the prick who didn't know the definition of the word, was trying to get him to rest. "Safe," he mumbled, wrapping his shuddering arm around Foggy's shoulders, "sleep."

He did.

Foggy didn't dream, but he did drool on Matt's new jacket.

\---

Two hours later, three separate things woke Foggy up at the same time:

Karen letting out a loud gasp.

The truck slamming to a rough stop, and one scrawny arm around him being the only thing that prevented him from going face-first into the back of the front seats.

And Matt growling, loud and furious and right in his goddamn ear.

Foggy jerked upright and took way too long to figure out that he wasn't in his fucking cot at the shelter. He swung his head around, trying to interpret the images his eyes were giving him-- the truck was stopped in the road, and Matt was clawing at the door, and Karen was breathing hard and trying to get the hell away from him as fast as possible.

"Whoa, whoa, _shit_ ," Foggy hissed, snatching Matt's arm before he could get the door open. "What the fuck, dude, what is it?"

Matt's voice was only a low rumble. No words came out.

Karen was goddamn hyperventilating. Foggy turned his head to tell her to calm down, and then saw what had made her stop in the first place-- it hadn't been Matt. It was a white truck, crashed halfway into an already-wrecked garage, tail-lights blinking bright red through the windshield.

"It's Deborah," he breathed, then snatched the bag of medical supplies from the floor. He lurched for the opposite door, got it open, and tumbled out into the road. His leg tried to knock him unconscious the second he hit the ground but he shook it off, getting back up. He had to get to her, she might still be alive, he could save her--

Foggy was just passing the driver's side door of the truck when Matt grappled him from behind, yanking him back, hard, just in time for Foggy to avoid getting his neck sliced open by a set of singing hot-blue claws. A beeping wail filled the air, and he saw silver.

Oh, yeah. Because aliens were still a thing, and Foggy was a fucking dumbass.

Matt practically threw Foggy back to the road, his low growl switching gear to a loud snarl as he stood defensively in front of him. Unarmed, because Matt was also a huge fucking dumbass.

The alien made a hissing noise like air from a ripped car tire, rearing up. It wasn't as big as the one from the previous night, and Foggy knew he should be thanking God for that, but it was still fucking huge and heading straight for Matt--

Karen heaved the driver's side door open and slammed it into the alien's goddamned face before it got too close, and it shrieked and stumbled but didn't retreat. She swung the door shut and back out again, hitting it even harder. That horrible high noise blasted into the air, and Foggy saw Matt flinch at the sound, but then it lifted itself and went for the door, because the stupid motherfucker was blind in the sunlight, and thought the door was the enemy.

"Get back, get back!" Karen yelled, stumbling into the road as the alien scratched wildly at the door, shattering the window, dragging its nails through the already-fucking-gutted frame. She had a gun in her hands-- Foggy's rifle.

Karen backpedaled, lifting it, but Matt was right behind her. He shoved her to the ground, huffing a snarl as he wrapped his fingers around the handle of the knife at her back and drew it. She saw what he was doing and shrieked, a reflexive noise of terror that Foggy wished he'd never heard, but Matt lunged right over her because she wasn't his target.

The alien stopped going for the door when its weight pushed it off its hinges and to the street, and it made a low chitter that was probably a big fat _Fuck you_ in its language of beeps and trills. It swung itself in their direction, but Matt was already there, the poisoned sunlight flickering off the edge of the knife as he stabbed upward, into the soft space between two iridescent plates. A furious sound came from him that couldn't even be classified as a roar, it was so goddamn primal. He twisted the blade as he yanked it out, then thrust it back into the same spot, and the alien's unnatural movements stopped all at once.

It tipped to the asphalt with the knife still inside it, legs twitching and kicking out worthlessly, splattering that oily silvery substance all over the street. A noise came out of it like a car with a bad timing belt, a shrill cry that pitched down and went suddenly silent. It stopped moving.

The whole road fell quiet, save for Matt's panting, and Karen's high gasps for breath.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Foggy said, because he was eloquent as fuck.

Karen pushed herself to her feet and scrambled back, leaving the rifle in the street as she tried to get further away from Matt. She ended up using Foggy as a shield.

Matt took a few more breaths, shaking his head once before bending down and retrieving the knife. He turned back toward them, still pale, but no longer swaying like he was about to pass out. "Okay? Foggy? Karen?"

"I'm okay, Matty," Foggy said, bracing a hand on the truck's rear tire to pick himself up. "Jesus, man. You killed it." With a goddamn knife in close-combat. He knew exactly where to hit it. What the fuck.

"Yes." He might have looked a little proud of himself as he placed Karen's knife gently to the ground in front of her. "Sorry." Apologizing for borrowing a knife so he could kill a fucking alien with it. Only fucking Matt, God.

Karen was breathing shakily. "Holy shit."

Matt made a humming sound and made to step toward her, probably to help her up, but stopped himself and returned to Foggy's side instead. "Okay?"

"I'm okay," Foggy said, and his reason for tumbling out into the road like a moron came rushing back to him. He lurched forward and grabbed his bag from where he'd dropped it, forcing his damned leg to cooperate with him as he hobbled slowly around the twisted, silent body of _a goddamn alien_ to get to the driver's side of Deborah's truck. His steps faltered before he got there, and he growled in frustration, a pathetic copy of his friend.

His friend, who was right there next to him, grabbing his elbow gently to stop him from falling flat on his face in the road. "Foggy. Careful," Matt said to him, pulling him back up. "Help. I want to."

"Okay, buddy, come on."

Again, Matt got Foggy's arm around his shoulders, and limped right alongside him to Deborah's truck. Foggy almost made a joke about how they'd make a whole person if they put their useful parts together, but it died in his mouth as he came around the driver's side and saw her.

She was bloodied, that was the first thing he noticed. Blood all over, on her face, in her hair, her clothes. The airbag had deployed and her face was half-buried in it.

"Matt, is she alive?"

"...Yes."

"Jesus." Foggy pulled away from his friend and opened the driver's side door, gentling a hand down Deborah's back, pulling his fingers away when he found gashes. Deep, but burnt. She'd gotten wounded, but managed to get away. Managed to crash into an already fucked-up garage. Her wounds weren't fresh, so the alien that Matt had killed must not have been the one to do it. Why had it been there?

He leaned forward, pressing his fingers to her neck. Her pulse was thready. "Deb," he said, running his thumb along the back of her head, looking for wounds, terrified to move her.

Foggy carefully pushed down the remains of the airbag, and he could see her chest shivering in and out with heavy breaths, a tiny trail of fresh blood dripping from her mouth. She was barely conscious, eyes moving around slowly beneath her eyelids, half-dead to the world around her.

"Deb." He couldn't move her, not yet. Internal bleeding, judging by the color of the blood coming out of her mouth. There was so much fucking blood everywhere else that he couldn't see anything but.

She shifted upon hearing his voice, opening her eyes with a painful sluggishness. Her head rolled toward him, and that was good, it meant she hadn't broken her neck. "Oh, hey. Frank," she said, like she was greeting him for breakfast. "F-Foggy."

"Hi, Deb." He pushed more of the airbag out of the way so she could breathe a bit less hindered. "You know what happened?"

She sighed, blinking hard, trying to curl up. She couldn't. "No."

Concussion. He needed to see the rest of her. He needed to find the worst of it. "Matt," he breathed. "I need you, buddy, can you come listen to her?"

"Yes."

Deborah was too busy trying to suck in a gasp to even notice that Matt was there; Foggy snapped his fingers in her face and ordered her to breathe. Matt leaned a little closer, blinking slowly, head tilted and face stiff with concentration.

"It hurts," she said, but she took in a rattling breath, and afterward she coughed out blood.

Matt flinched, but didn't retreat. "...Not good," he said, at length, tilting his head in Foggy's direction.

"Where's she hurt, buddy? Can you tell me?"

"Um." Matt gestured to his own shoulder, his own chest, his own legs. "Not good," he repeated. "Inside."

Bleeding internally. Foggy had already figured that one out. Still, _fuck._ "Is she hurt in her spine, Matty?" He tapped Matt's back to indicate the area he was talking about. "Is she hurt here?"

"Yes."

"Fuck." He turned back to Deborah; she was unconscious again. " _Fuck_. How bad, Matt? How many breaks?"

Matt took Foggy's hand and closed three of his fingers.

" _God_. Jesus. Okay." Well, moving her was out of the goddamn picture for now. God, he wasn't made for this shit. His expertise was learned from books, and he'd never had to deal with a spinal injury before. Foggy leaned into Deborah's truck, tapping her cheek. "Hey, I need you to stay awake."

She groaned and spat out blood again.

"No, no. Wake up, Deb. You are not allowed to sleep right now." He couldn't shake her awake because he'd probably kill her. Foggy continued talking, increasing the volume of his voice until she responded.

Deborah shifted her head on her shoulders and opened her eyes, glaring at him like he'd just woken her an hour before her alarm clock. She caught sight of Matt next to him and blinked in confusion.

Then consciousness grabbed her, rough and sudden, as she noticed the tremor in his hand. She jerked, but couldn't move away. "Oh, God. You're..." she hissed, and tried to get up, and a scream bubbled from her throat when she lifted her head from the airbag.

"No, no, no, stay still!" Foggy put a hand on the back of her head, trying to keep her down. "It's okay! He won't hurt you!"

"Feral," she groaned, through broken teeth, eyes fluttering. Half-asleep, again. The worst kind of sleep. She shivered with an attempt to recoil and a gurgling whine of pain came from her mouth. "It's a feral, Frank."

"I know it is." Foggy yanked open his bag, gathering an IV to put in her arm, a rubber band to help find a vein, and his penlight so he could see what the fuck he was doing. "He won't hurt you, Deb. He's here to help."

"Help," Matt echoed quietly, keeping his head bowed, just like he did around Karen.

"Here, Matty, hold this." Foggy turned on the penlight and stuck it in Matt's good hand, guiding it round until it was hitting Deborah's arm. "Hold it still, okay? Right there."

"Yes."

Deborah's breaths were shuddering in and out of her, each one a little more shallow than the last. "A feral," she hissed again, unable to focus on anything else.

"Yeah, I know. Don't worry about that." Foggy tied the rubber band around her arm and started with the IV. She didn't flinch at all when the needle went in her, and he chewed hard on his tongue because he knew it was a very bad sign. Internal bleeding and spinal injuries, what was he doing? What was he _thinking?_   She was _already dead._

But God fucking dammit, he was trying anyway. _Someone_ had to try.

He couldn't get the IV in. She'd lost too much blood, too much pressure. Foggy felt his eyes burning, his chest spasming as he fought back sobs. "Matt, come closer," he said, needing more light, but his voice broke and a sob forced its way out between the cracks in his words and then they all started spilling out of him all at once.

"Foggy," Matt whined, worried, drifting closer.

Deborah caught Matt's movement out of the corner of her eye and jolted again, frantically trying to push herself away from him. Foggy grabbed her arm but she was too panicked, and she twisted and fell on her side in the front seat. Something popped inside of her, so quiet but so fucking heavy. She started shrieking in agony, and didn't stop.

And Foggy was just sobbing worthlessly and he didn't stop, either. "Shh, no, oh my God, Deb, shh-- you need to be quiet-- you need to--"

She screamed, _"Help!"_ as loud as she could, but only once, because the blood bubbled back up in her throat and her cries became punctuated by coughing, and she was in so much pain that Foggy was sure he could feel it in himself.

Sedatives, his brain told him, and he climbed out of the truck to get them, nearly collapsing when his leg hit the floor. Matt grabbed for him to try to help but Foggy shoved his hand off. He still had the ketamine. He could put her under and move her somewhere safer. He could save her.

Foggy nearly ran straight into Karen, who'd been standing behind them, probably this entire time, but he hadn't been paying attention. He grabbed his bag, fished out the ketamine, a syringe, and turned back, wishing he could be faster and praying that he could be better.

He hobbled back to Deborah's truck, and she was dead.

Matt still stood where he'd been asked to, clutching the penlight and frowning. Nobody talked, nobody made a sound. The silence swept in between all of them, a frozen and sluggish whirlwind. Foggy slowly leaned into the doorframe of Deborah's truck, and his sobbing started again, and he couldn't stop, and it hurt so fucking bad, more than his leg ever would.

He slid to the ground without really registering it, and Matt followed him, silent, expression crumpled, reaching out one gentle hand to pull him close and push their foreheads together.

Foggy leaned into him and cried, and cried, and cried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _So maybe it gets quiet, and maybe it gets numb._  
>  _At least then there's still something to share with someone._  
>  Matthew Ryan


	14. head full of doubt...

Karen stared at them like a wild animal would stare at an oncoming train.

Frank had been on the floor for the past fifteen minutes, sobbing, the kind that rocked his entire body and caught his breath up in his throat, making him gasp for air every other second. And that would have been bad enough to watch, but Matt was there, too, silent and frowning, forehead pushed up against Frank's like they were glued together, his shuddering hand moving clumsily along Frank's arm in some attempt to comfort him.

"It's my fault, Matt, it's all my fault, it's my fault," Frank was mumbling over and over, like he was stuck in a loop, with each new repetition less comprehensible than the last. And Matt was trying to deny it, trying to tell him it wasn't his fault at all, but the words weren't coming out right, because very few of his words ever did.

Karen had told him plenty of times, he just never wanted to listen. She stared for another half of a minute, then turned and slipped out of the crumpled garage and into the street. Her heart was racing but it wasn't because of Deborah or the alien or anything outside of the goddamned garage. She could still hear the sobbing, and walked a little faster to rid her ears of the noise, to try to yank the feeling that was carrying over from Frank and burrowing into her head.

They should have been prepared. They knew exactly what had happened last night. Frank himself had said that he didn't think anyone had survived. They should have known better. Karen tried to pass the blame to something else, anything else, but only found it in her own hands, and in Frank's.

So she pushed her hands hard down her face and kept walking.

The alien was still curled dead in the street, and she slowed as she approached it, half-expecting it to leap back up and try to kill them again. She halted a few feet away, staring, and she found that she would rather stare at a goddamn dead alien than have to watch Frank sob so hard it was like he was coming apart at his seams.

It was a juvenile, probably planet-born. It had pulled its legs, with their too-numerous joints, tight and twisted up into itself in death, in a way that reminded Karen of bugs and spiders. She nudged it with the toe of her boot, feeling the weight of it. There were furrows in its back, all along the strange malleable plates that covered the bastards from head to toe. Scarring. No feral would leave scars like that, which meant it had fought other aliens. Slick, oily blood had spread out all underneath its body. Well, Karen assumed it was blood, but she had no way to be sure, and she didn't much care for speculation. It was a substance that looked like watered-down mercury.

Bending at her knees, she peered in closer, running a hand down what she assumed was its neck. It bent like a neck, and turned like a neck, but it was strangely long and serpentine, and what should have been a skull at the end was just a flat protrusion with a beveled edge. No eyes or nose or mouth. Karen pushed at it until she could get to the area where Matt had stabbed it. _Twice._ While he was within close enough range for the alien to lop his head off.

Karen had nearly drawn her damned gun and shot him in the back when he'd thrown her down and taken the knife from her. And for a moment, then, she'd thought he was going to kill her, but no, he'd just waltzed right up to the goddamn alien and stuck it in. Because he was fucking insane. Her mind took her back to her past life, an apartment, an alley doused in rain. There'd been a knife then, too. And he had probably still been insane.

Shaking her head, she forced the memory away, and hovered her fingers over the top of the wound. The damned thing smelled awful at this range. Burnt ozone and rubber, and that sharp acrid tang beneath all of it, entirely alien, a brand new smell to taint their brand new world.

Karen rocked back on her haunches, studying, wondering how the fuck Matt knew where to hit it. He'd been so goddamned precise. So had the masked man in the rain. She drew her knife, blinking at the silvery oil that she couldn't quite rub off of it, mostly studying the length to see how deep it had gone in.

Sighing, she stood up. She'd never seen a feral fighting an alien, but she'd seen ferals that had been torn to goddamn shreds by them. The two tended to keep away from each other for some reason she didn't know and didn't care much to find out, although both creatures tended to live in groups and fight amongst themselves.

Karen used to love that about them. Right now, she didn't know what the fuck she was feeling about anything. It was really starting to get on her nerves.

She turned to move back to the truck and nearly stumbled on the detached door, laying in the street after being torn off. A sigh hissed out of her and she lifted the door up with one foot, wondering if she could put it back on. The hinges were twisted and broken, so probably not. Perfect.

The road was empty and silent. The sun hung above, lime-green through the poison and the smeared clouds that were still lingering around. They had not, and likely never would, bring rain. Which, well, was a fucking good thing, because the last thing they needed was to be trapped in a goddamn rainstorm without shelter.

God, they were running out of time. It was going to get dark soon, and fucking cold, and, oh yeah, Frank, fucking aliens, stop crying into your feral-shaped tissue and get the _fuck out here_.

That's what she wanted to say, but, as had been a trend for her for the past week or so, she said nothing at all.

Karen climbed into the truck, then folded her arms gingerly on top of the steering wheel and sighed. It was much quieter here. Peaceful, despite the alien twisted up next to her. From here, the sobbing was just a distant echo. Easily attributed to the wind.

She picked idly at a scrape on her knuckle, debating whether to go out there and drag his ass back out. They had to get going. Didn't he know that?

Still, she didn't climb out of the truck, didn't go back to the garage, and she didn't force him up and out and moving. She blamed it on Matt, on not wanting to be near him. It was easier that way.

And, as was typical with the stretch of luck Karen had been having, Deborah's truck was goddamn useless now. She could tell from a single glance, stolen while watching Frank fumble all over and try to save the life of someone that was already dead. The front end of it was twisted and even if Karen trusted the engine to turn over and the vehicle to move forward-- which she didn't, because she didn't trust anything-- getting it out of the wrecked garage was going to take more time than they had to spare. And Frank was still _wasting_ time sitting around and crying about shit that had never even been his fault.

It was the first time that her and Matt-- the twisted, infected, and far more dangerous version of him-- had shared an opinion on anything.

Karen stretched her arms, wincing as they pulled at her stitches. She hadn't ripped any yet, and she supposed it had a lot to do with Frank's skill at putting them in. The ones she'd tied his leg back together with were pretty bad. Her hands weren't meant for it. They'd always been far more skilled at holding guns.

She thought about a pistol in a warehouse and breathed another sigh, pushing the memory away like she pushed everything else away, waiting for it to fade and crowd in at the edge of her thoughts like scavengers at a corpse. She'd done far worse than that in the past two years. She'd done some pretty horrific shit.

Her mind, the vindictive bitch that it was, decided that instead of going silent, it was going to drift back to a tranquilizer gun in the mud and a confused, pained expression-- and she leaned her head forward to bang it out of her and onto the steering wheel. It wouldn't get the image out of her head. Nothing could.

"You're gonna give yourself another concussion, you keep doing that."

Karen jerked upright. Frank was back out of the garage-- finally, _Jesus_ \-- with Matt holding him up, looking both better and worse than the last time she'd seen him. His voice was low and cold and dead, like her own, like the alien in the street. She wasn't sure what he'd done about Deborah's body, but he'd returned with the medical kit and a shotgun that he'd probably taken from her truck. It didn't look like he wanted to burn her or bury her. They didn't have time, anyway.

They weren't going to have enough time to get to Eric's place, either, if they lingered here much longer.

Karen lifted her head and frowned at him anyway. Her eyes drifted back to the dashboard of their own accord, not wanting to be on him, terrified of some visual carryover of emotion. The dial for the engine's RPM was broken and stuck permanently in the middle of the reader. She already knew that, though, because she'd been staring at it a whole hell of a lot in the past day.

Her voice was just as dead as his. "...You okay?"

"Is anyone?" He was leaning most of his weight onto Matt, who continued to cart him around, toward the door to the backseat. He didn't complain. No, he seemed _happy_ to do it.

"Get in. We gotta go," she said, as they passed, and Matt flinched and tucked his chin against his chest and didn't speak.

Yeah, that shit was driving her crazy. Every time she moved near him, he jumped and bowed his head and fell silent and she really wanted to enjoy it, she _really fucking did_ , but it just made her stupid stomach twitch with an emotion she didn't want to figure out. Asshole.

Frank let Matt guide him back to the truck, and she watched idly as the latter of the two trailed his hand around the door until his fingers found the handle and pulled it.

She shifted in the seat to make sure her knife was still at her back. It was.

Frank sniffled again as he settled down in the backseat, rubbing his face one more time as Matt slipped in next to him, keeping his face turned away from her. She wondered how he knew to do that, when he had no visual facial cues to look at and work off of. Then she wondered why she was wondering.

"Hope we make Brooklyn before it gets dark," she told them, rubbing her thumb on the steering wheel.

Frank said nothing, his expression dead, an echo of her own, staring silently out the window. He was almost as pale as Matt, eyes bruised, shoulders slumping. He looked like shit. They _all_ looked like shit.

Karen started the engine, put the truck into gear, and pulled back into the road, leaving the alien and Deborah's wrecked vehicle and Deborah herself behind, another set of bones that nobody had the strength to mourn.

\---

There wasn't much to Eric's place. It wasn't even much of a place, either, just a tiny apartment above what used to be an even smaller auto body shop. They'd spent the last two months fortifying it, though, putting the purifier together, strengthening the doors and windows.

Words slipped through her mind, bitter and angry.

_Over here, you'll see where Eric was gonna keep me the rest of his life as his own personal fuck-buddy. Welcome home, assholes._

She bit her tongue, and kept it to herself.

Karen pulled the truck up to the garage door and put it in park, shivering out a sigh. She rubbed her face with her numb hands. It was _freezing_ outside, and the wind had blown in endlessly through the empty space where there was supposed to be a door.

Every time she'd looked back at the two in the rear-view they were tangled closer together for warmth. She felt a paradoxical and uncomfortable mixture of revulsion and jealousy, and she didn't know what to do with it, so she did nothing at all, trying to keep her gaze to the road and searching for imperfections in the asphalt or half-crumpled signs to focus on.

She climbed out into the street, watching her breath puff in the air. Unlocking the garage with one of the keys on the truck's keyring, she too a glance around to make sure nothing had been stolen and nothing had gotten in. It looked relatively untouched. Karen climbed back into the driver's seat and eased the truck carefully inside, wincing as the spotlight scraped lightly along the garage door's track.

"Here it is," she said, and nobody answered. Matt kept his customary silence and Frank-- well. Frank hadn't talked at all since they'd left Deborah's truck. He'd dozed a little, tucked up tight against Matt, who just held him tightly and stared off into emptiness, shivering so hard it was rocking his entire body. Karen had no idea how the hell Frank was able to fall asleep with Matt's constant motion bleeding over to him.

He was awake now, though, face twisted in pain as he pulled himself out of the pocket of space between Matt and the door, grumbling as his back popped.

"So, there's no generator yet," she said, twisting the keys in the ignition. "Uh, the-- upstairs, that's where the living space is." Karen waved vaguely to her left, where a set of stairs led up to the apartment. "It's not really... well, there's water, so..."

Nobody responded to her, so she stopped talking.

Frank moved slowly and gave her a glance, eyes empty, then talked to Matt. She ground down the sudden weak buck of emotion-- what was that, fucking _jealousy?_ \-- from her brain, and straightened up, feeling the sutures in her back pull against her skin.

"C'mon, buddy, you need some fresh air before you throw up all over the car." Frank's voice was rough and weak, like he was both half-asleep and sick at the same time.

Matt grumbled. It was a sound that rattled low out of his chest, something far more animal than human. He made a lot of noises that were no longer human, but he flinched and frowned when she turned herself in the seat to watch them, pulling his face away, hanging his head lower, and _that_ was a distinctly human movement. Paradoxical. He climbed out of the truck after Frank, scrambling to not be alone with her.

Karen blinked. How could he possibly be more afraid of her than she was of him?

Frank hissed when his feet touched the concrete floor. He reached out and clumsily snagged Matt's arm before he could run off. "Stay with me, dude. My leg." His voice was low and dead now, and reminded Karen of her own. She blamed her worry for him on the fact that he was the only medically-trained person they had, and left it at that.

"Foggy, yes." Matt's head was twitching in all directions. Her first thought was neurological damage, crippling whatever part of his brain that kept his head and arm still-- but then she remembered that empty stare, that burning concentration when he was listening for the aliens at the shelter. It was also focus, she realized-- him centering and triangulating on every noise he could pick up, likely an unimaginable amount, and the virus was fucking with his ability to stop moving.

For the first time, she wondered idly to herself how much it bothered him. If it was frustrating, having his body twitching outside of his control, or if he was used to it, accepting, because he couldn't recall anything else. She remembered Frank's description of just how sensitive Matt's ears were, and wondered for the first time how much more overwhelming the city would have been before it had burned to death--

Fuck, she was thinking about it again. Karen chewed on her tongue instead of sighing, because she'd been sighing a lot, and was fucking tired of it.

It smelled far better inside than it did out by the river, or at the remains of the shelter. She moved to pull the garage door down, glancing over the reinforcing sheet metal that Eric had attached a few months ago, probably around the time he'd gotten bitten, the lying motherfucker. There were smears of blood and something far more disgusting all over the metal, but nothing had been broken off.

The sun had dipped below the horizon outside, forcing hues of gold and green between the buildings and all over the streets. A light breeze picked up and blew grey dust over the fissured sidewalks. Karen shut the garage door against the dying light, locating the cross bar and locking it into place. They were exceedingly lucky that nobody else had found the apartment and taken over, but it was located in an area where she knew a feral pack lived. She knew this because Eric had chosen it.

"Ugh, stairs," Frank grumbled, voice echoing empty through the garage. He circled around the truck, peering over the shelves piled with parts of cars and parts of guns and parts of things that Karen couldn't even identify. "Definitely gonna need your help, Matt." Yeah, no shit. He sounded like he was about to pass out.

"Yes. Help. I want to."

"How's your knee? Can you climb these?"

Karen watched as Matt slipped over to where Frank was standing at the bottom of the stairs. He moved uncannily, never bumping into anything, only trailing his fingers gently along the truck and the walls to guide himself. Again, she found it hard to remember that he was blind, until she caught a look at his face and saw his eyes, empty and dark and useless.

"Hm. Yes, Foggy. Ca-- I can climb."

Foggy rolled his head in Matt's direction. "You can climb what?" he pressed tiredly, and Karen questioned it only a second before she processed the tone of his voice. A gentle order, because he was still teaching Matt how to talk again. The idiot was minutes from collapsing on his feet, and he was _still_ pressuring Matt to work harder on his speech, still attempting to repair the shattered creature that had been dropped into his lap.

Matt rolled his eyes, and it made him look so much like the man she used to work for that she went still for a few seconds. "I can. Climb. St-stairs." He huffed and spoke again, more quickly that time, as if the last words were just a practice run. "I can climb stairs. Foggy." They were. He was learning.

"You're a miracle," Foggy said, and Karen wasn't sure if he was being sarcastic or not. "Come on." He started up the steps, grunting, and Matt shadowed him closely, his shivering hand on Foggy's back. Hell, Matt was the one with the goddamn knee wound and he was moving the easiest of the three of them. He'd beaten the fucking shit out of Eric with the same wound. Pain tolerance, or stubbornness? Both?

Or was it because he was _Matt_ , and at the time, there had been far more important things to him than the blood dripping down his leg?

Thinking about it again. She bit harder on her tongue and might have drawn blood.

When they got to the top landing, Karen followed slowly behind. Her back hurt too much to carry anything up from the truck and the other two hadn't grabbed shit. She rolled her eyes-- fuck it-- and sighed when she reached the second floor. Frank was probably going to lie down on the first level surface he could find and sleep for two days. Karen wished that she could do the same.

The afterthought of sunlight poured in through the two windows, filling the cramped living room with that sickly yellow-green color. The apartment wasn't much, but neither was she. A couch sat against one wall, a futon on the other. A coffee table, a bookshelf. A tiny attached kitchen with a lamp on the counter. The fridge and oven were gone, replaced by more shelves and piping that came up from the purifier down in the garage.

"Holy shit, Matty, look," Frank said softly. "A fucking bed."

"Bed?"

"Yes. This is mine. Paige, I'm calling it right now. Mine." If he was a little more awake, and his voice was a lot stronger, she knew he would have sounded like Foggy just then. He crossed the short space to the futon and sat on it.

She wasn't going to fight him for it, because then she'd have to fight Matt, and well. "Yeah, whatever." That was neutral enough, right?

Frank groaned, flopping down on the shitty black mattress. "I want to sleep forever. Can I sleep forever?" He was trying so hard to sound alive, but he sounded six feet under, and his attempt at a joke came out sounding sad and desperate.

Matt did not hear it. "No," he said, climbing up and stretching out next to him on his stomach like he'd fucking been born there. Frank flopped an arm over Matt's lower back and Karen felt, very suddenly, that she was privy to something that she shouldn't see at all. They were so comfortable with each other that, from where she was standing, they looked like one person sharing two bodies.

Karen slipped to the back bedroom-- no longer a bedroom, now it was storage, mostly-empty shelves because her and Eric had planned to bring the supplies when them when they'd left the shelter next week. So much for that fucking plan. There was a cardboard box in the corner, though, with a jumble of unfolded blankets stuffed inside. She crouched and stiffly lifted the box, movements made awkward by the fact that she couldn't bend her back.

She came back out and Frank was asleep already-- she'd seen that coming. Matt was curled up at his side, fiddling with one of the buttons on the other man's jacket, silent. He looked so small, all tucked-up with his limbs tight, and she tried not to stare.

"Uh," she mumbled, and Matt jolted and tilted his head in her direction. She remembered how he would orient himself as well as he could toward her, signifying that he was listening, that she was his focus. Karen no longer wanted to be under that focus. She dropped the box noisily to the floor next to the futon and tried not to look like she was running away as she ran away to the couch on the opposite side of the room.

Frank grunted, blinking his eyes open, and he was awake for only a few seconds before they slid shut again.

"Blankets," she said, pointing at the box. Worthlessly. Of course Matt couldn't see it.

But Matt rolled over onto his chest, blinking, then reached out and brushed his fingers over the cardboard edge of the box, pulling it toward himself. She watched as he danced his right hand over the top of the mess, then grabbed one-- a faded blue duvet-- and pulled it out.

Blind, he is definitely blind, she reminded herself, watching as he sat halfway up, cast the blanket over Frank's body, then wedged himself against Frank's side, huddling under the curtain of fabric that was left over. He kept himself facing in her direction, and she really wished that he hadn't, because she didn't need any more excuses to stare at him like an animal in a cage.

Wasn't that what Matt _was_ , though?

Darkness seeped into the apartment, gradually. She still had her knife at her back, and she kept it there despite how the handle dug into her lower spine. Her gun was in her jacket and her jacket she took off and draped across the back of the couch to keep it at hand. Karen was fast; she could draw it, cock it, and fire it quick enough if Matt decided she was a threat in the middle of the night.

She told herself that she wasn't going to sleep, that her nerves would keep her awake, that she'd spend the next twelve hours staring into the dark corners of the apartment and waiting for Matt to jump up and go after her.

Karen settled herself gingerly down on her side, rested her temple on the armrest, and fell asleep immediately.

\---

She opened her eyes from a dream that was filled with screaming in the dark, and the polluted sunlight poured into them. Grunting, she rolled onto her other side and pushed her face into the upholstery behind her. For a couple of empty seconds, she forgot about the situation she was in, and when her memory righted itself, she wanted to fall back asleep just to get that short moment of ignorance to return.

Right. Frank, the truck, the aliens, Deborah, and of course, Matt.

Her shoulders shivered with pain as she lifted herself up off of the cushions and into a cross-legged position. She certainly missed the ability to sit with her back to something, but she'd been wounded there before, and recovered just as well.

She blinked, staring across the dusty living room to the futon, expecting it to be empty, for them to be up and gone.

No, they were still there, both of them sleeping now, tangled together like they'd die if they were separated. Matt had pushed himself close and Frank was clutching him tight like he could disappear at any moment. She could see the tremor from across the room, shaking the both of them gently and endlessly, but neither seemed to take notice. And of course, they were both snoring. Softly, but still. _Soft_ became _deafening_ in the silence of the apartment.

Sighing, she got to her feet, padding quietly over to the kitchen. There wasn't much food, but she found one of those miniature boxes of cereal and grabbed it. Froot Loops. Karen dug a chipped mug out of a box and filled it with water piped up from the purifier-- it dribbled slowly out of a thick plastic tube that had to be manually opened with a clamp, but fuck, it was water and it wasn't black.

When she stepped out into the living room, Matt was upright on the futon. She jumped, fighting back her surprise, biting her tongue to stop from making noise. Telling herself it was just the sudden image of someone in the room that had startled her, she moved to the couch.

His head followed her as she crossed the rough carpet, then he lowered it and huffed through his nose. From anyone else, the sound could be considered a sigh, but from Matt, it just sounded like something from an animal. Which he was.

Wasn't he?

Karen opened her mouth and wished she hadn't. "Morning."

Matt startled, just as hard as she had when she'd seen him. "Um," he mumbled, and then continued to mumble, and it was nonsense, and then he followed it up with some vague, low humming. He was fucking impossible to understand, and she wasn't sure how Frank got anything out of the noises that came out of his mouth.

She sat on the couch and started eating, staring at the floor. Staring _very hard_ at the floor, because she wasn't going to stare at the fucking feral. Him living here was bad enough. Frank could have the task of interacting with him, because she certainly wasn't going to.

Then Matt shifted, and she _had_ to glance up, because what if he'd decided to kill her? What if he decided he was done playing at being human and became what he actually was?

Not even close. He simply turned, facing her and tucking his legs up underneath him. In the anemic light coming through the windows, past his shaggy mop of hair and the constant twitch of his head, he nearly looked like Matt again. He looked like the man she'd given a monkey balloon to, quiet and hunched and alone in a ruined apartment.

"Karen," he said, slowly, two awkward syllables with a backdrop of mumbling. "Um." He licked his lips, fiddled clumsily at the duvet with the hand that held the tremor. "M-... morning."

She stuffed cereal into her mouth instead of answering, moving her gaze back to the floor. She didn't talk to ferals, she didn't talk to ferals, she didn't _talk to fucking ferals._

Matt waited a minute or so for her to reply, then huffed again, and she could _feel_ the goddamn defeat in it. He settled his feet to the floor and got up, moving uneven and cautious through the living room. Karen watched him as he drifted along one wall, ghosting his steadier fingertips along it. He stopped at the junction between the kitchen and the living room, head tilted, blinking slowly like he was searching for something.

She thought, _He's mapping out the space for himself_ , and she wasn't sure where it had come from.

No, she knew _exactly_ where it had come from. She just didn't want to listen to it anymore, that stupid fragment of her brain that kept whispering doubts into her fucking ear.

"The bathroom's over there," Karen said, keeping her voice quiet, because she could still be polite to Frank, who was snoring softly on the futon. He needed to rest before he went fucking insane, before she had to hear that awful sobbing again. She gestured to the bathroom door with a wave of her hand, and realized her mistake a few seconds later. "Uh. To your left."

"Mm?" He still moved in that direction with that strange grace he had, even with a limp, and a tremor fighting for dominance over half his limbs. "Tha--thank you. Karen."

"Paige," she corrected.

He ducked his head a little more. "Mm, no. Karen."

She glared at him and of course he didn't react. He'd never react to her death stares, not like everyone else did. Karen supposed she could just get up and yell, force him to correct himself, but the thought of doing that-- the thought of having to see him confused and frightened and cowering away from her-- destroyed her appetite in half a second.

God fucking _dammit_. What the fuck was going on in her stupid fucking head?

"I prefer Paige," she ended up saying.

Matt was trailing his fingers around the bathroom door, rolling his thumb over the hinges, the jamb, the doorknob. "Not Paige."

She was arguing with a goddamned feral that could barely put two fucking words together. "Yes, Paige."

He slipped inside the bathroom and shut the door instead of arguing. _Somehow_ , she couldn't see him winning too many arguments unless it devolved into violence.

Karen glared at her cereal and picked at it, and was considering going down into the garage to do something other than think about a goddamned feral when Frank shifted on the futon and spoke to her.

"Yeah, don't even try to change his mind about that." His voice was tired.

She shifted her glare from the food to him, but just like his brain-damaged friend, he wasn't affected. "Why'd you tell him that was my name?"

Frank rolled onto his back, wincing. "Uh. Because it _is_ your name."

"No, it isn't."

"I think we've had this conversation before," he mumbled, then yawned. "Changing your name doesn't change the person you are."

"You're the one telling me to call you Frank, Jesus."

"'Cause my name _is_ Frank. Franklin. You just no longer have nickname privileges."

She scoffed. "I don't know how I'll survive," she ground out, trying to keep her voice neutral, failing miserably. Assholes, both of them.

To her shock, he laughed. It was low and fragmented, but it was a laugh, and she tried not to break her goddamn jaw off by clenching her teeth so hard when she heard it.

"Where'd Matt go?"

"Bathroom."

"Oh."

She closed the little box of cereal back up and rolled it around in her hands. "Guess it's a good thing he's housebroken."

Frank laughed again, but it was quieter, weaker. "He's not a savage, Paige. He understands hygiene. Mostly." He finally moved, pushing himself to a sitting position with a groan. His hair was goddamn everywhere and he hadn't even taken his jacket or boots off, he'd been so exhausted. She was pretty sure if the futon hadn't been there, he would have just flopped down on the floor and slept for the same amount of time.

The light from the window poured over him, and he did look a little better. He looked like he was trying to be Foggy again. His voice was still off, but it didn't seem like he was about to collapse or burst into hysterical sobbing. Thank God.

As Karen continued to glare at him, he looked away from her and lifted his head toward the kitchen. A smile spread across his face. "Matty, hey."

She turned to look and there he was, that silent shadow of the lawyer she used to work for. Jesus, he barely made a fucking sound when he moved, but his quiet, empty expression cracked apart immediately to a wide grin as soon as he heard Frank's voice. It looked so different that it was like another person-- another _feral_ , what are you _thinking_ , Paige-- had emerged from that kitchen.

"Foggy." Matt crossed the space and his feet carried him gracefully around the coffee table, before he leaned in and pushed their foreheads together. Even though they'd just spent the entire night tangled up like some kind of abstract sculpture.

Frank's smile began to mirror Matt's grin as he dug his fingers into the hair at the base of his friend's neck. "Hey, buddy." Now, _now_ he looked like Foggy again. He was even starting to _sound_ like Foggy again. "When'd you wake up?"

"Mmm. Not a lot, minutes." Matt's grin didn't fade as he tossed himself onto the futon, all legs and arms and fucked-up hair. He started feeling up the duvet. Weird. "Okay?"

"I'm... I'm better, Matty, I'm better."

Matt said something, or tried to, but it was a jumble of nonsense that Karen couldn't figure out. There were definitely vowels. And Foggy's name, a few times.

Frank just shrugged. "I dunno, man. Maybe later today."

Another undulating rumble that sounded like a different language altogether.

"Yeah, I know. We'll find something, you know we will."

Then Matt said, "Hungry," and she definitely understood _that._

"Yeah, man, me too." Frank rolled his head on his shoulders a few times, then looked over at her. She realized then that she'd been staring at them for the past few minutes, and jolted her gaze to the ground. Too late. Frank made a low, half-humorous scoff, and didn't mention it. "Anything to eat, Paige?"

"Uh. Yeah, there's... cereal, in the kitchen."

"Awesome." He shifted, putting his feet down on the floor, hissing when he moved his injured leg.

Matt jerked upright at the noise, and there was concern on his face. Heavy and obvious concern, so much that even Karen could read it. He pressed one hand to Frank's lower back and made a low sound, at the back of his throat. Worry. He was worried. "Foggy, okay?"

"My leg," Frank grunted. "Help me up."

"Yes." Matt shoved the duvet aside and got to his feet, and even from where she sat, Karen could tell that his knee was still troubling him. He didn't seem to notice, and held out his stronger hand, pulling Frank to his feet with an unfair sort of ease. "Okay?"

"Y-yeah. Let me lean on you."

"Yes," Matt repeated, and Karen wondered if he even knew any other words for 'yes'. She remembered their room in the shelter and his quiet voice, _Swimmingly, what is this?_ and _Foggy, use 'good'_  and then realized how hard she was thinking about it before letting out an audible grunt and trying to squash it from her head. _Trying_ , now that was the key goddamned word, here.

Frank looked over at her, raising an eyebrow. "You okay?"

"Uh? Yeah."

"Don't think too hard, smoke'll come out of your ears."

Matt huffed his laugh-- did he understand the fucking joke?-- and adjusted Frank's arm over his shoulders. Karen glared holes into the rug and tried to get her stupid brain to shut up. She heard them move to the kitchen, then Frank's voice uttering a quiet, "Bathroom first."

Karen knew there was a glower on her face, and the muscles stretching over her skin felt weird, tingly, like a limb that had been asleep was just starting to have blood running back through it. She didn't like it and she didn't want anything to do with it. So, naturally, it kept fucking happening.

They started talking again, one muffled but clear from the bathroom, one clear but garbled in the kitchen.

"Foggy, I found."

"Found what?"

"Don't know. Mm. Metal."

"Are you sure it isn't the shelf, Matt?"

"Not shelf."

"Not _a_ shelf," Frank corrected him, with all the alacrity of a reflex.

Matt repeated it with a grumble. "Mmm _ugh_. Not a shelf. W-w-w--"

"Window?"

"Foggy, no. W--"

"Wire?"

" _Foggy_. St-st... _ugh_." She heard Matt make a low whining sound, then pause for a moment. "Foggy, s-silence."

The bathroom door opened. Frank's voice sounded ten times louder. "Did you just tell me to shut up?" Another pause, and then his volume dropped and went soft. "Hey, hey, shh, it's okay, I'll help."

Karen kept staring at the floor.

"Foggy, minutes. M-more minutes."

"Time, Matty? More time?"

"Y-yes." He sounded upset. Karen was upset that she knew what upset sounded like, especially on _him_. "More time."

"For what?"

"Wo-w-words. More time, words."

Karen understood well before Frank did: Matt was asking for more time to speak, because it took him ages to say anything. He _understood_ that it was taking him ages to say anything.

She didn't share her discovery, but Frank eventually figured it out. "...You need more time to talk?"

" _Yes_. More t-time, Foggy, t-time t-t-to talk." She wasn't sure if his stammering had to do with the brain damage or the fact that he'd always stammered when flustered, and Karen found herself actually trying to destroy the carpet with her fucking eyes when she realized she was actually comparing _Matt Murdock_ to the twitching animal that was all mumbles in the kitchen.

"Sure, dude. Of course. I didn't mean to... aw, Matty, don't cry."

Matt forced out some noises that Karen wouldn't have even classified as speech, they were so distorted, and she heard him sniffling, and lifted her head--

No, no, _no_. She forced her eyes back to the floor. This was stupid. This was all really stupid. Ridiculous, if anything in her life could ever be attributed to such a word. There was no reason for her to worry about a goddamned animal, there was no reason for her to have that awful gnawing half-pain in her gut about a _fucking feral._

There was absolutely reason to have it about _Matt,_ though.

She dragged her hands down her face until she was sure she was about to knock her goddamned eyes out and listened to Frank's low, calming voice mumbling words that she couldn't hear. And Matt, sniffing. Because he didn't cry like Frank did, with heaving gasps and sobs. Karen had learned that already.

She had learned it in the truck, when Frank had passed the fuck out, and Matt had hunkered into himself and twitched silently, shoulders shaking, nothing but quick breaths for air coming from his throat. Tucked up against the door of the truck, swaying and struggling to stay half-conscious and pale, pale, pale-- he'd looked like a frightened man much younger than he actually was, all his layers stripped off raw so she could see the terrified creature underneath.

And when she'd moved into the back to help, he'd gasped, and made a high whine, and scrabbled at the truck door until he got it to open. He'd tumbled face-first into the alley, then spent a minute getting himself back to his feet, staggering like a drunkard. He'd fled, terrified, from _her_ , while there were still drugs in his system and he could barely goddamn walk.

Karen dropped her face to her hands and wanted to drop her body to the couch, but didn't. Matt was still sniffling in the kitchen, Frank still whispering to him with a gentleness she never thought possible in their world of blood and poison. She was overjoyed that she couldn't see them, because she knew it would be an image she wouldn't be able to get out of her head.

She opened her box of cereal and put a piece in her mouth in a desperate attempt at distraction, but it just tasted like ash and cardboard and she had to force herself to swallow it.

A thought buzzed across her mind, unbidden, unwelcome: Matt was just as lost and confused as she was.

An audible noise came from her throat, a half-groan directed at her own goddamned head. This needed to stop. All of it needed to stop. There was just too much bullshit going on right now.

She needed a drink. She didn't have one.

Karen dug her fingernails into her scalp as hard as she could, hoping to draw blood, but the pain just became pain and it didn't detract from her thoughts or what was happening in the kitchen at all. God. She glared at the floor and didn't move.

Until two seconds later, when Frank's voice came from the kitchen, "Uh, Paige--" and she nearly jumped across the fucking room in surprise.

"Whoa! Jeez, calm down. Pretty sure you can tell from there I'm not an alien."

She took a few deep breaths, because she probably hadn't done so for the last couple of minutes. "Yeah, whatever, God. What do you need, Frank?"

His expression was hard and silent. _Christ_ , now what? "Yeah, uh, you two... uh, we all gotta talk. Like, right now. Before I lose my shit."

"About what?"

"Don't you fucking play dumb. You're smarter than that."

Yes, of course, that was _exactly_ what she wanted to do right now-- try to hold a conversation with an animal that didn't know the definition of the word. She rolled her eyes and ignored Frank's noise of distaste. "What in the hell are we gonna talk about? He barely speaks English."

"Yeah, _that_ shit? That's what I'm having a problem with. Just 'cause he can't speak doesn't mean he can't understand. Come on, Matt," Frank said, leaning into the kitchen and fishing the feral out.

Matt looked like he'd been fucking beaten. His face had crumpled in on itself. He kept his chin tucked down and his hair in his face and moved slow and robotic to the futon, Frank limping heavily behind him. For once, he didn't seem particularly focused on the pain in his leg.

Karen glared at the both of them across the scant ten or so feet between the couch and the futon. No effect.

"All right, let's get our shit straight," Frank said, and sat down with a whuff of air. Matt tried to hide behind him, and Frank groaned and snatched a handful of the other man's hoodie to keep him where he was. "Nope, stay next to me. Hey-- don't start panicking, it's gonna be fine."

He was frightened just to _talk_ to her. She felt the frown coming and couldn't force it away. "So..." she started, and her voice was so weak she could fucking taste it.

"Yeah. So. If we're gonna be shacking up together, we gotta get this crap worked out." Frank leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and he had a look on his face like she'd see when he was in court, or discussing a case, and suddenly it was Foggy that was sitting across from her. "I know you're afraid of him, but he's scared shitless of you. You carry a gun around like you think he's gonna jump you, but trust me, if Matt wanted you dead, you'd be in the fucking ground already."

Matt mumbled a weak, "Foggy, no."

Karen spoke over him. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"I'm not trying to make you _feel better_ , Paige. I'm trying to stop him from panicking every time you talk to him. I'm trying to keep this shit show from devolving into a... _bigger_ shit show."

She sighed, harsh and dark through the particles of dust highlighted by the beams of sunlight in the window. "I don't have to listen to this," she said, moving to stand up. The garage was empty enough, she could wait in there until--

"Uh-uh. Sit your ass down. We aren't done."

Karen glared at him, the hardest, most burning stare she'd ever had on her face. He held it and didn't falter. An impenetrable wall, made of brick and... fucking _loyalty._ "I don't know what you want me to say, Frank. _'Sorry, I've been nearly killed too many times by things like... like that',"_ she gestured to Matt, who had tucked his legs up against his chest, _"'so I find it a little hard to relax around them'?"_

"Yeah, and I get that. Trust me, we both get that. Matt most of all, he's the one here who got fucking _bitten_. He's lost everything because of them." Something flickered across Frank's face. "And so have you. _Karen_."

Anger flared up in her chest at the name. It burned and twisted and she wanted it out. "You have no right. You have no _idea_ the shit I've _been through--"_

"You're right! You're right, Karen, I don't. Because you won't tell me. You won't talk to me about fucking anything, and hey, guess what, kinda hard to be on your side when you wall yourself off like a stranger every time I look at you." He shook his head. Matt was silent next to him, fiddling with the corner of the duvet with sharp, agitated movements of his hand. "And you know what, you don't even have to tell me anything, although that would help. All I really want, Karen, is for you to fucking... to fucking try. I need you to try."

"Try _what?"_

"To be fucking decent to him!" It sounded like that would have been his only order, but it wasn't. "To put yourself back together! Because I've thought about it, and I can't do it for two people. I'm not good enough."

Because of course Matt would take precedence. Karen glared at Frank's knee, then the coffee table, then the carpet. The anger had collapsed to something numb and cold. Everything in her was roiling and it felt like a hurricane was trying to break out, a confusing and agonizing feeling. Her eyes were itching, too hot and too tight. She reached up to rub the irritation out of them and they were wet and--

_You don't have to stop breathing to die, you know?_

And before she could do anything else, the hurricane broke open, and she was sobbing. Hard and harsh and painful, more painful than the cuts on her back, more painful than anything that had happened before. They burned fire through her chest, sandpaper in her throat, and she couldn't-- she couldn't--

Fucking--

_Stop._

This wasn't safe. This wasn't _safe_. This wasn't protecting herself, this was exposing the weakest parts of her to the open for the wild creatures of the world to leap upon and tear apart. Karen pushed both her palms into her face, repeatedly, but it didn't help. Nothing was going to help. She was making loud, pained noises that echoed around the room. Hearing them made it impossibly worse.

Everything in her head looped in on itself, rushing up sudden and unwanted and unstoppable: Eric, the shelter, high shrieks in the night, a tranquilizer gun, a confused question of 'why'. The thoughts curled back and in and all the way to that first night of blinding fire, and she didn't want to go there, she didn't want to go, but it took her anyway, screaming and panicking: the terror she'd held in a subway tunnel, the morning of smoke and poison, the school bus, the shelter, the day a year later when she'd been caught and thrown down and _taken_ by the ferals in Central Park and they'd destroyed half her face and all of herself and--

There were hands on her shoulders, suddenly, stopping her from falling off of the couch and onto the floor, and she didn't even care who it was; she pitched forward and put her head on a shoulder and poured out sobs and screams into their worn jacket. She felt a hand on her back, not gripping violently for a hand-hold, no seeking fingers forcing themselves under her clothing, only gently running up and down, up and down, up and down, and she sank into the sensation because it was comforting and she fucking deserved comfort, she fucking _deserved it._

"Shh, shh, it's okay," she heard, a faint whisper against her temple that she could barely hear because of her own fucking sobbing.

Words came from her throat, punctuated by the sobs, unbidden and deafening and she hated it but she hated herself even more. "I don't-- want-- to be here. I don't want to-- be here. I want _out!"_

"Out of where?" It was Foggy, of course it was Foggy, his voice measured and soft and caring and she wanted to go deaf to not hear it anymore but she wanted to fall into it and stay there until she fucking died.

"Everything," she answered him, and his jacket was soaked where her face was sat. She spoke in wails around the sobs and she just wanted to stop. "I-- don't want this-- anymore, I don't want to-- to be here, I don't want to--" her voice hitched and she pushed her face hard against his shoulder until it _hurt_ but it did nothing to help anything.

The words came out from the deepest part of her, the part she thought had died, the part that Foggy had reached out and pulled carefully up from that pit everything else had sunk into: "I don't-- want to-- be _alone_."

"You aren't alone, Karen, you know you aren't alone," was his reply, and she heard the truth there. She wanted to capture it in her hands and keep it for herself just so she knew what it felt like. "Shh, it's all right. It's gonna be all right."

Karen believed it because she had to, and nodded once, awkward, against his shoulder, and he adjusted his arms and it took her a moment to realize he was lifting her up off the ground because she'd collapsed down to it at some point. She had also shut her eyes in an attempt to force away the pain and the blistering heat that was in them, but it hadn't helped. Karen opened them and found herself on the couch, Foggy next to her, solemn as anything. She put her face back in her hands to hide what was on it, then remembered he'd already seen everything anyway, and dropped them to her lap. Slowly, the pain in her chest began to fade, and the sobbing along with it. Karen thought it would be a relief, but she only felt empty and cold.

Foggy's hand was still on her shoulder, thumb idly ghosting along her collarbone. "You're okay," he spoke quietly. "It's okay, Karen."

There was movement to her left, faded blue, and when she looked over she saw Matt, sitting on the coffee table with the duvet rolled up in his lap. His head was still bowed, but she could see pain on his face, mirroring her own, on how he gnawed at his bottom lip and fiddled his fingers along the blanket. It took her a second to realize she hadn't jumped, or shrank away from him, because the part of her mind that snarled, _Feral, feral, feral_ had warred with the part that sang, _Matt, Matt, Matt_ and this time, for the first time, the singing won.

He held the blanket out to her with his right hand, and his face angled away.

Foggy made a soft sound next to her and might have been preparing a warning for either of them, but before he could speak, Karen reached out and took it. She watched as Matt's face turned a little bit closer to her, and the pain was washed away by something else that she couldn't figure out, but this time, for the first time--

She wanted to.

"Thanks," she said, and her voice was still shaky and weak, but it was there.

Foggy helped her get the duvet around her shoulders, hands dancing gentle around the wounds on her back. He gave her a thumbs-up, and his solemn expression now held a smile.

It hurt, like pulling a muscle that she didn't know she had anymore, and it was so, so frail, but she took the chance, and didn't fight it.

She smiled back.


	15. ...road full of promise

Well, that had certainly been unexpected.

Foggy was sitting back on the futon, Matt stretched out behind him, obsessed with a loose thread on the mattress. Karen was still on her couch, curled up against the armrest with the comforter around her shoulders. Her eyes were rimmed with red, a weak fire for the sharp blue ice of her irises. She'd fallen quiet, but was still shifting with weak spasms every once in a while, and he would have stayed with her longer but she'd gently pushed him away and he'd acquiesced.

He hadn't meant for that to happen. All he really wanted was for her to get her _Matt-hating_ shit out of her head, not for her to cry out every goddamn drop of liquid that had ever been in her body.

It was good, though. He knew it was good. She needed to cry. She'd needed to cry for _years_. It was like she'd made up for lost time, smearing tears and snot all over his jacket and basically shrieking in his ear. What a noise. Almost as bad as Matt's high, sharp whine when he was in pain, but Matt hadn't flinched from it; no, he'd tried to get _closer_ , worry and confusion on his face. He'd wanted to _help_. After all she'd done, her dismissal of him, her hate and misplaced fear, and the fucking _tranquilizer dart_. All that, and he still wanted to help her.

The most surprising part was that she'd _accepted_ it. He'd been hoping for small steps as far as Karen was concerned, and she'd gone along and scored a fucking touchdown in a half-hour. Typical.

Foggy pushed his fingers through his hair, tightening his hairtie, then brought his hands back and ran them hard down his face before settling one on each side of his nose. Yeah, they were all pretty much fucked to shit, but he'd put another piece of Karen back together, so that was something. A victory. A horribly-fucking- _needed_ victory, after Deborah and the shelter and Jack.

It was going to be with him for a long time, he knew, her sharp scream of pain, the look of terror on her face, permanent now, just like the one on Jack's. And Matt, God. How hard he'd apologized, just for standing next to him and being there and being _himself_ , being _feral_. Foggy hated himself enough and there was no reason for Matt to have more of his own guilt when he already had a whole fucking ton that was naturally there. Another thing the virus couldn't get out of him. Foggy wished it had. He'd trade the lack of speech for 'lack of feeling bad about everything ever' any day.

But Matt was Matt, and if Matt was good at anything, it was feeling guilty, even when something wasn't anywhere near his fault.

Foggy turned the thought over, and it told him that _he_ didn't need to be so guilty, either, but there were people _dead_ because he wasn't fast or smart enough. The thought turned again, triumphantly: there was a woman with a piece of herself coming back together and a man who could speak when before he could not, and that was Foggy's doing, too.

Everything was a stupid mess. He shoved the thoughts out of his head with a sigh, then leaned back and nudged the sprawled form behind him. "Hey."

Matt twitched, jumping half-upright. "Hunh?"

"Were you falling asleep?"

"Hunh? Foggy, no."

"Oh, you _liar_."

"Mmph."

"Don't grunt." Foggy nudged him again. "I gotta get our shit out of the truck. You wanna help?"

"Yes. Help. I want to." All the words came out evenly, almost lyrical, because he had been saying them so much. The more he repeated things, the clearer they became. He just needed time.

And yeah, Foggy had fucked up that shit in the kitchen. _Royally_. All Matt had been trying to tell him was that he'd smelled water in the purifier. That was what Foggy got for trying to finish sentences for someone who barely had a grasp on what he was saying in the first place. Even if he wasn't a lawyer anymore and was just a shitty doctor, he could take solace in the fact that he would always and eternally be a monumental dumbass.

But he'd pulled Matt back, because that was what he was good at, and Matt had just whimpered into his shoulder and told him that he wanted to go back to the shelter because he didn't want to be around Karen. In so many words. It was mostly a bunch of _Don't want_ s and silenced crying.

And then Foggy'd gone to try to patch things back together between the two of them, and, well, there they were. Everyone crying. What was a bucket of tears between friends? Were they even friends? Did it fucking matter, if they were still together anyway?

"All right. Help me up, bud?"

Matt climbed off the futon and straightened, stretching his arms before turning and giving Foggy his good hand. He was using the other one less and less. It was too sporadic, too untrustworthy. There was still strength in him, though, as he sucked in his bottom lip and pulled Foggy upright.

The nerves in his leg flared with pain for a long few seconds, then slowly faded. Foggy was already really goddamn tired of it. "Thanks, Matt."

"Mm."

"Here. You say, 'You're welcome,' when someone tells you 'Thank you'."

"Um." Matt was working on getting Foggy's arm over his shoulder. "Mm. You're-- you're welcome." He pronounced it _wall comb. Yew or wall comb_. All in separate syllables, because his brain was filing them as separate words. A new set of sounds he could make, and repeat, and eventually he would handle them just as well as he handled _Foggy_ and _What is this_.

"Good job," Foggy said, quiet and breathless, as he put his injured leg down.

Matt still heard it, though, and a grin flashed across his face. Every time he smiled like that, Foggy was brought back to a dusty apartment and an _I got you something_ , and it was starting to hurt a little less every time. That was good, right?

Foggy glanced back at Karen, who was in the same spot, her eyes now closed. If she was sleeping, that was okay, too. As long as she wasn't sitting there, alone, stewing in her own rotted emotional trauma. She needed sleep just as much as anyone else.

The kitchen was still quiet and still unbearably empty. "O-kay, Matty. Easy on the stairs."

They started down, one step at a time, Matt a steady and sturdy presence at his side despite the vibration of the tremor spilling over as a gentle hum on Foggy's arm. "G-got, Foggy."

"What?"

"Got." Matt blinked, forgetting a word. "I got."

"Heh. You got me, buddy?"

"I got m-- _you_ , Foggy."

"I know you do." And he had no worldly idea how he'd still be alive, if it wasn't for him.

Not just because of the Matt before the virus had eaten him alive, but _this_ Matt, _now_ , the only one there was and the only one Foggy needed. Steady and gentle, shielded power and bottled lightning, at his side. Good God, he was lucky.

Matt got him to the bottom stair and paused, chewing his lip for a second before removing Foggy's arm from his shoulder. "Foggy. You, mm, _you_."

"Me, what?"

"Hn." Matt gave him a feather-light push, but kept his hand inches away, to catch him in case he fell down. "Mm. Gone."

"Gone?"

He dug around for a similar word in his torn head and came up with, "Um. Go away?"

Foggy wished he could make a joke about that, but it'd just confuse him. He took a second to dig through his own head for the word Matt was looking for, wishing they could swap notes like in college. If only he would have taken some form of disability law, then maybe he'd know a little more about what the fuck to do just by association.

It was obvious Matt actually didn't want him to go away, and it took Foggy a moment, but he worked it out. "Move, Matt? ...You want me to walk by myself?"

"Yes." The smile flashed back for a moment at the knowledge he was being understood. It always seemed like such a surprise to him. "M-move. Walk. By my-- mm, you-yourself." He pushed his crazy fucking hair out of his face with his shivering hand, keeping the steady one close. "Won't leave, Foggy."

"I can walk by myself, Matty."

"Know that." He blinked slowly. "Li--... mm. Lis-listening. I listening."

"That's 'I'm'. 'I'm listening.'" Foggy paused. "'I'm' means 'I am', Matty. It's just shortened. Takes less time."

It took him a minute to filter the new information, eyes flicking around slowly in a way that always made Foggy think of a rusted machine's gears sluggishly turning. They always seemed to be going a little bit faster, every time he saw it. "Hn. I... um. I am listening?" he guessed, lifting his chin in Foggy's direction for guidance.

"Perfect!"

Matt grinned. It took ten years and a virus off of his face. "Okay. Foggy. W-w-walk. By yours-self. Walk by yourself. I am-- I am lis-- listening. I am listening." He licked his lips, and his eyes flicked back and forth once. "Walk by yourself. I am listening." And he lifted his chin again, slowly, as if to ask if he'd done all right.

_Wow_. Foggy kind of had to stop himself from leaping across the face and slapping the poor guy on the shoulder, because _damn_. He also kind of had to stop himself from bursting into tears like a huge baby because _holy shit, Matt_. "Perfect, dude. Jesus, you're smart."

"Not." Matt chuffed at his own mistake, but looked as proud as anything when he corrected it with a new sequence of words. "I am not." He gestured to the floor and the grin on his face refused to budge. "Walk."

Foggy could feel the heat of Matt's hand next to his arm and moved, slow and careful. His leg was _working_ , it just hurt like hell whenever he had to extend it, or put weight on it. A low grunt came from his throat around the fourth step, and Matt responded almost before the noise left him, a strong and slender hand on Foggy's elbow.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. It hurts." He'd gotten to the side of the truck, at least, and reached out to lean against it. "What'd you hear?"

Matt bobbed his head unevenly from side-to-side. "Mm. Stitch-stitches."

Foggy opened his mouth to say, 'You already knew I had them,' but then shut it, giving him a little more time. He'd learned from his mistake.

"...No, mm, no break."

"That's good." He wanted to smile at how he probably had the only working x-ray machine left on the planet. Shame it was horribly uncalibrated. "You think it'll be okay?"

"Yes."

"Can you tell if it's getting infected?"

Matt rolled his eyes around, thinking.

Foggy opened his mouth to say something else, but instead decided to start with a soft hum, a vocal probe to make sure Matt wasn't just looking for what to say. The last thing he wanted was to see that look again, frustrated to tears. He waited a moment, and didn't get a response, so he talked. "...Like your, knee, Matty, remember? When it was warm?"

"I remember." He tilted his head. "Not infected."

"Well, that's good." It meant Karen had done a decent job disinfecting it, at least. Good thing he'd been passed the hell out. Because fucking ouch, alcohol. "At least we have antibiotics. Come on, let's haul this stuff upstairs, okay?"

Foggy stepped forward to lean into the tailbed and start digging shit out from where it'd been wedged behind and between the barrels, but Matt stopped him with a hand on his arm and hopped effortlessly onto the tire, over the wheel well and into the truck.

"Dude. Your knee."

"Mm? Foggy, hurts not a lot." He bent down-- Jesus, _ouch_ \-- and started tugging Foggy's duffel and the satchel from his own past life toward himself. Karen had grabbed a few bags, and a box, apparently, a big one with an Ikea logo on it. He was pretty sure it wasn't a set of postapocalyptic lawn chairs. Probably guns. There was also the food and blankets, all wrapped tight together and stuffed behind the barrels so they wouldn't fly out of the tailbed while they were driving.

Karen had said something about getting a canopy for the truck, but Foggy wasn't too sure that was still on the roster after that fucking alien had ripped the door off like it was the top off a cup of yogurt. The scratches in the side of the truck were still there; he ran his fingertips along them and shuddered when he remembered that the thing that had ripped through the truck's siding had also ripped through his fucking calf. Jesus, he was lucky he wasn't _dead_.

"Foggy. Here." Matt straightened up with their two bags in his arms and hobbled over.

"You're not supposed to be moving around like that, man."

Matt tilted his head. "Need. Need to. Karen, um, not good." He waggled one hand at his own shoulders. "Karen hurts." He gestured at his own leg. "Foggy hurts. I hurt, um, not a lot."

Foggy felt both a grin and a frown fighting for territory over his lips. He reached up to take the bags from him. "You think that 'cause you don't hurt as much, you need to do all the work?" Why was this a surprise?

"Work, what is this?" Matt asked, while bending down and grabbing the Ikea box and doing _all the fucking work_.

"Moving around, grabbing shit, picking things up. You know, what you're doing right now. That's work."

"Mh," he grunted, as close to a dismissive sound as he could get. He pushed the box to the edge of the tailbed-- it sounded heavy as hell-- then turned to grab Karen's bags.

Foggy put their bags on the floor and waited to be handed the rest. "You know I'm gonna have to poke at it when we get back upstairs." He was just glad he hadn't put stitches back in. Foresight had actually worked out in his favor, for once. Shocking.

"Foggy, I am-- am-- am okay."

"Do you even want to know how many times you've said that to me, Matty?"

"Hm. No."

"At least a hundred."

Matt handed him Karen's things, carefully. Two backpacks, one heavier than the other. "Hundred, what is this?"

"It's a number."

"Hm."

"Do you remember? You know, one-two-three?"

"One-two-three?" Repetition. Nope, he didn't get it. Matt went back to the Ikea box, drumming his fingers gently along the cardboard, head canted. Listening to what was inside it. Because he knew it wasn't his, it was Karen's, and she wouldn't appreciate if he went digging through it. Ownership was a concept that he understood.

"I'll have to teach you, then." Foggy wasn't too sure how to start that process. He couldn't remember much of elementary school, let alone fucking kindergarten.

Trying to remember kindergarten classes so he could teach his best friend how to count again, God. His best friend who used to be the smartest motherfucker he ever knew. The guy who would help Foggy study, night after night, who remembered fucking _everything_. Numbers and addresses and names and stupid movie trivia. Gone.

"...Teach?" Matt echoed softly, pulling his attention from the box. His expression was soft, hopeful. "Yes. Foggy. I want to. Um. To do."

"Of course. You know I will."

There was that grin again, brought to life with a simple spark, bright and wide and practically splitting Matt's face in half. "Foggy, thank you." And that stupid genuine lilt in his voice. Some things just couldn't be burned out of him. Matt turned back to the box and brushed his fingers along a corner edge. "Gun, inside. A lot."

"Yeah, Karen told me she found a few."

"Karen want?"

"Probably. Leave it there for now, though. It looks heavy as hell." Foggy shouldered both of Karen's bags and Matt hopped down and took the other two. When he turned back to the stairs, he had to swallow a groan, because _God_ he did not want to climb back up them. "You first, Matty."

"...No."

"Ugh, don't fight me on this. Just get up there."

Matt huffed and took the stairs at a jog, because he was an idiot when his own health was involved. He dumped the bags in the kitchen, then came back down, took the remaining two from Foggy and repeated the action. Then, of course, he went back down the stairs _again_ to help Foggy get up them.

And Foggy, because he was still a monumental dumbass, had climbed down to the garage anyway, and now he needed help getting back up there. He might have felt guilty for Matt having to do all of it, but he was already fifty pounds overweight with fucking guilt, and it was a little hard to force anything else into that syrupy mixture of memory and emotion that he had to keep shoving to the back of his mind. Things kept slipping through the cracks no matter how tightly he packed it.

Matt placed him back down on the futon, movements gentle and cautious. He always moved like that, when Foggy was involved-- everything always so careful, so measured, like he was afraid he'd break the whole world if he did anything incorrectly.

"Thanks."

"Y-you're welcome."

They both grinned, and Foggy bent to grab his satchel, digging out the green spiral notebook and a pen.

Karen shifted on the couch and lifted herself up, staring blearily around the living room. At least she'd slept a little. "You brought my stuff up?"

"Well, yeah, we aren't gonna make you do it," Foggy said, opening the notebook and blinking at the four pages he'd written to keep track of Matt's plateau. It'd been a long time since he'd looked at it. Jesus, he could scarcely believe both of them had survived all that shit. He turned the last page, running his eyes over the final plateau-- something he'd done more than once, trying to find some pattern, some sign that he might have known what was coming. Still he found nothing, and still, it didn't matter. The damage was done already.

He turned to a fresh page and clicked the back of the pen on the table.

"What's that for?" Karen asked, wincing as she pulled the duvet tighter around her shoulders.

"Inventory."

"Ah. Right." She was staring at the floor again. "So, uh, not a lot of food."

"Nope," Foggy said, pawing through his medical supplies first, jotting down medication names and strengths. Amoxicillin, thank God, because apparently that was the antibiotic that decided it was going to work with Matt's immune system. He turned to say something about it, but Matt wasn't there, and the second he opened his mouth to call for him, Matt appeared from the kitchen with the bundle of blankets and noodles and random shit in his arms.

"Dude, stop getting stuff. You're going to fuck up your knee even worse."

"I won't."

"You _will_. Sit the fuck down."

Matt rolled his eyes and dropped the stuff on the floor between the coffee table and the futon, then sat obediently with an annoyed sound trying to break out of his throat. He muffled it, of course, because Karen was in the room, and dropped back, laying down on the lumpy mattress.

"No bitching," Foggy said, grabbing another bottle-- cephalexin, expiration date _pre-apocalypse_. Gross. He wrote it down anyway.

"N-not bit-bitch _ing_ ," Matt grumbled, putting emphasis in the wrong spot again.

Karen kept her mouth shut on the other side of the room, but the corners of her mouth were twitching.

"No moping, either. Sit up." Foggy found another bottle, wrote it in. "Here. You're gonna count these for me."

"Count?" Matt grunted himself into an upright position, and frowned. "Foggy, don't..." he looked ashamed to admit the next part, and it was fucking awful, because it wasn't even his _fault_ , "I... don't know... this."

"I know you don't. I'm going to teach you."

The second Matt interpreted those words, his whole expression lit up. A smile landed itself smack-dab in the middle of his face, gentle and eager and bright, _bright_ \-- just like its owner. "Foggy, yes. Show. Teach." He scooted to the edge of the futon, leaning toward him, like he was about to learn all the secrets of the universe.

Maybe he was.

Foggy grinned. "Ready?" Of course he was. "Let's go." He started picking up bottles. "One, two..."

\---

"...Twenty-one," Matt said, setting the last bottle-- Tylenol-- on top of the stack.

It had taken only forty-five minutes, and during it, Foggy had found out two very important things:

Matt was _still_ the smartest motherfucker that Foggy had ever met;

And Karen had started to smile again around the number ten and it hadn't gone away the whole time they'd worked their way up to twenty-one.

She never said anything, of course, keeping to herself on the other side of the living room, but Foggy kept glancing over at her, and every time he did, she looked less like Paige and more like Karen.

The only way he could have been happier would be if the shelter hadn't been flattened to the ground, if a bunch of people hadn't needed to die before they'd gotten to this point. Foggy still tried not to think about it. He tried to focus on his friend in the same way his friend was focusing on the lesson: intently, like nothing else existed besides the numbers and the medication.

Foggy pushed the bottles back to the other side of the table. "Do it again, Matt."

"Yes." And Matt did it again, a little faster than the last time, his speech a little less halting and garbled, the movements of his hand plucking them from one side of the table and over to the other a little more fluid. "...Twenty. Tw-twenty-one."

Foggy threw up his hands. "See? Total smartass. I don't know where you get it."

Matt stacked the bottles up again, like last time, the heavier ones on bottom and the lighter ones on top. "Not a smar-smartass," he said, but he was still smiling, and it didn't look like was going to stop anytime soon. Foggy was practically basking in it. "More?"

"That's all the bottles we have. You'll have to find something else to count." He let out a breath. All of this was much easier than he'd anticipated, and he knew most of it was just Matt. Just Matt and his insane hunger for _everything_. "You've done a lot, man. Let's eat, and finish going through our stuff, and we'll start up again."

"...Okay." He was clearly trying not to look disappointed as he went digging through the pile of supplies wrapped in the blanket. There were the noodles, of course, which he stacked next to the bottles (while counting them-- fourteen), and the other blankets, still carrying that faint scent of burnt rubber, which he shoved aside. At the bottom, the CD player still sat, hinges and cover broken.

Matt paused and picked it up like it was a wounded animal. A frown attempted to chase that easy smile off of his face.

Foggy frowned for him. "I know, buddy. Sorry it broke. I said I'd find you another one."

"Mm." He placed it on the coffee table next to the rest of the things, gingerly, as if it could break further and become even less useful. Matt pulled the headphone cord out and idly twisted the wire around his fingers, and damn-- there was the frown, booting the smile clean from his expression.

Foggy nudged him with his elbow. "You okay?"

"...Yes." He wasn't, but Matt wasn't about to show it. He seemed to realize how inconsequential the damn player was, like it was some sort of weakness to want to hear music again. It was because of Karen, Foggy knew. Fuck, it wasn't like Matt owned much else. He didn't even own his body most of the time.

"...Hey, you know what? When you get another one, I'll find you some more CDs. You want more to listen to?"

"Yes."

"I bet you'd like some techno music," Foggy said, nudging him again.

Matt let himself fall backwards until he was lying on the futon. "Techno, what is this?"

"Well, it's a type of music. It sorta... had a lot of drumming. Unst-unst-unst, you know, that's what it sounded like."

"Unst-unst-unst," Matt repeated, and huffed a laugh. "Not music."

"Oh, my God, I can't believe this. A music snob."

Karen made a noise from across the room, and when Foggy looked, she had her face pointed at the floor. What the fuck, was she trying to laugh? She was smiling still, but quiet-- she hadn't said much since she'd fallen to pieces against his jacket. He knew she would come around-- she just needed some time to sort out the bullshit in her head. They all did.

"You okay, Karen?"

"Huh? Yeah."

"Unst-unst-unst," Matt said again, trying to wrap his mind around it. "Foggy. Um. Mine, um. I w-want." He winced at his own speech, his frown getting a little heavier. He hurried to fix it, but the words weren't there, and he ended up grunting and squeezing out a weak, "Um."

"No, I think I get it. You want _your_ music, right?"

"Yes."

"That was Vivaldi. I mean, that's what the CD said."

"Viv-Viv--" he stumbled on it and huffed loudly. 'V' was so fucking hard to get out of his mouth. Foggy wished he knew why. "V-V-Vival--di. Ugh." He could get the last bit out fine, but the first half always seemed to jump out of the way of his tongue.

"Let's just call it Four Seasons, Matty." Because they couldn't call it _violins_ , either.

"F-Four Seas-seasons. Four Seasons, Four Seasons."

"Perfect."

"One, two, three seasons?" Matt asked. "Where?"

Foggy laughed. "I don't think they exist." Fuck, if only he knew more about classical music. "That's just the name. I think. 'Four Seasons'."

"Hn."

"Trust me, if I find One-Two-Three Seasons by Vivaldi, you'll be the first to hear it."

Matt was still fiddling with the headphone cable. "Okay." He rolled over on his side and brushed a thumb along Foggy's elbow. "...Thank you," he said, clearly. "Foggy. Thank you. Teach."

Foggy patted Matt's unhurt knee. "I told you I would."

The frown went away again, replaced by the smile, and Matt burrowed his face in the futon and promptly fell asleep.

\---

So, not a whole shitload of food, which sucked. Decent amount of medical supplies, which rocked. Blankets, yes, water, yes. There was a lot they still needed, though. Food, obviously. Clothing, mostly because it was getting colder, and hell if Foggy was going to let Matt freeze his ass off with his shitty cargo pants and shittier shoes.

There was enough now for them to last at least a week-- long enough, he hoped, for Matt to heal, because Matt was going to be the breadmaker in this relationship. Again. Foggy's leg was going to take a while, and Karen's back even longer, because of the location. She moved too much for his approval, but he wasn't going to jump her shit unless she popped a stitch. No, she was a little fragile right now, and he had to treat her carefully.

And Matt, well, he was already climbing around on shit like he wasn't even hurt, which was heartening, but also really goddamned worrying. He'd been jumping around in trees with an infection that should have killed him; who could say he wouldn't hurt himself again and work through it like the stubborn idiot he was, only to make it far worse?

Foggy sighed. _The more things change_ , he thought, something that had repeated itself a lot in the past few days.

Still. First thing: healing. Everything else he would worry about after they'd crossed that bridge. The Matt Can Walk Again Without Pain Bridge. He bet it'd be standing better than the Washington, when all was said and done.

He dug back through his satchel again, and was glad he'd kept some of his books in it, because he would have gone insane in the silence, listening to two people breathe without anything to do. Foggy pulled one of them out-- 'Emergency Care, Eighth Edition', a heavy yellow thing-- and put it on the coffee table, digging out his pen from between the sheets of the notebook.

Research. He wasn't particularly good at it-- studying had been Matt's greatest hobby in college, after all, and Jesus, Matt was _still_ better at it-- but he sure as hell always needed to learn more. The smallest thing could save a life. And now that he had arguably the two most important lives in his hands, well.

Matt was still sleeping behind him, arms tucked up under his chest. It always seemed to mitigate the tremor, at least a bit, and he always slept that way if he didn't have Foggy to flop himself all over the top of. And drool into.

Foggy hunted down the _good_ blanket-- which still smelled like the shelter but was far softer than anything else in the apartment-- and draped it over his friend, who burrowed his forehead against the mattress with a grumble. The headphone cord was still tangled up in his fingers.

Straightening back up, Foggy picked up his pen and dug into the next chapter. Four. _The Human Body_. What was this, amateur hour? He made to skip ahead, at least until he got to something he didn't know, but stopped at a section about the human nervous system.

He was halfway through the first sentence when Karen eased herself up from her half-curled position on couch. She hadn't been sleeping, he knew that. Getting her mental ducks in a row or whatever. She winced, and rubbed her face-- yeah, she looked a lot better. Her face wasn't so red, and her eyes were clearer, less glassy.

"Hey," he said, softly, hoping she would take the cue and keep her voice down, as well.

She did. "...Hey."

"How're you feeling?"

She blinked slowly. "My eyes hurt. I need to pee."

Foggy felt the weak smile on his face. Absence of worry. It was a nice goddamned feeling. "Yeah. I think you fell asleep. How's your back?"

"Oh, it hurts."

"Need me to take a look?"

"Yeah. Later," Karen grunted, and gingerly stretched her arms before standing up. She wobbled only once, then caught her balance again, and gave a short glance to the two of them on the futon before moving into the kitchen. Foggy went back to his book.

The information on the nervous system lasted about half a page. Super useful. He still ran the pen underneath a few passages-- the ones he thought would be helpful if he had to paw back through the book in a hurry.

He skipped through more pages, glancing at the pictures, wondering why all the models in all his medical textbooks looked like they were half-asleep. Some of the dramatizations were hilarious, too. Yeah, he could tell it was ketchup and not blood. He _was_ a doctor. Sort of. Kind of. Except not at _all._

Deborah's voice, in his head again, her terrified shriek--

"You know," Karen spoke suddenly-- and softly-- from the direction of the kitchen, and the memory died away from his mind. "He... he sleeps a lot."

"Yeah, uh, he does. It's the virus." Foggy didn't look up. He blinked a few times, making sure his brain wasn't going to echo itself, before he turned the page and carefully highlighted another passage. _Diastolic blood pressure_. "It's some kinda... chronic fatigue. Or some other fancy-sounding term I haven't read yet." He tapped his pen on the book.

"...Really?" she sounded surprised, and it put strange and light twist into her normally monotone words as she walked back to the couch and settled herself down.

"Don't tell me you only know about the tremor."

"I haven't exactly made a job of studying ferals."

"You've killed a million of them. Never noticed anything but the shakes?" He turned the page, then turned it back. _'Manubrium'?_   There was no _way_ that was a real fucking word.

"No."

"Well, Matty would be your ideal case study. Since he's disinclined to bite peoples' faces off." Oh, wow, it really _was_ a word. Color him surprised. "Read that notebook. I wrote down all his symptoms."

"Why'd you do that?"

He shrugged. "We thought it might help someone someday. Maybe someone will make a vaccine, or a cure."

"A cure?" She sounded dubious.

It _was_ dubious. "...Well. I think most of Matt's damage is permanent. But maybe they'll find away to halt the advance of the virus or... or something. I don't know." He turned the page again. _Lifting and Moving Patients_. That would have come in handy if Deborah hadn't shrieked herself to death. Fuck. There it was in his head again. He spoke over it. "...A vaccine, though, that'd be useful."

Karen shifted a little. "Well, what are his other symptoms?"

Foggy finally looked up from the book. She was schooling her face into that careful blankness, or trying to. He could still see a little worry. Curiosity? It was a strange sort of heaviness around her mouth. He stretched across the table for the worn notebook, and tossed it over to the couch. "Here. First four pages. It's basically a fucking bible on the virus."

She grabbed it slowly, and started leafing through it. "...Plateau? What's that mean?"

He twirled the pen in his fingers. "He had, uh, spells. The virus, it would like... get really strong for a little while? Really fucked him up bad, for a couple days. Usually had to... you know. Carry him home. Shit like that."

"...There's so many."

"Yeah. I wasn't kidding when I told you about taking care of him. He always pulled out of them, though. Until that last one."

She flipped to the final page. Her lips twitched like they were trying to frown, and then, after a few seconds, she actually did frown. "I didn't know the virus could do that. Come and go."

"It was always there. Just... stronger sometimes. When he was on the plateau." He leaned back a little, careful not to disturb Matt, who only shifted minutely and kept right on sleeping. "...He fought it off for a long time, Karen."

"And he was... normal? Before?"

He scoffed. "Matt's never been normal. But yeah. After that last plateau... the tremor came back, no real reason. Two days later, _that_ happened to him." Foggy jerked his head behind him. Matt continued to snore. "Middle of the night. You know. I told you." It hurt to talk about, but he'd put up with it if it helped Karen figure out her shit.

"He attacked you."

"Yeah. I, uh. Shot him. Flare gun. That scar on his face, here." Foggy tapped his own right cheekbone, then his own temple. He made eye contact with her for a few too-uncomfortable seconds before he looked back down at the pen in his hands. "...I almost killed him with it, Karen." And fuck, he didn't like thinking about it, but he couldn't change it, just like Matt couldn't change getting bitten and Deborah couldn't change breaking her spine in three places. "He bolted."

"But you found him later. In the Park."

"No, _he_ found _me_. You should have seen him. He was so... angry. So _different_. Same clothes. Beat to hell and back. Dirty." Foggy blinked and he could still see the image, a ghost behind his eyelids. "But he protected me. He's always protected me."

"Why didn't he attack you again? Like before?"

He shrugged weakly. "Couldn't tell you a specific reason. But I think he kept part of himself, somewhere. Something the virus hadn't destroyed. There's a lot of him left in there." He turned the pen over and over in his fingers and wouldn't look at her. "And, well, he's my friend. He'd do the same for me."

"I know." It looked like she was priming to say something, but then she tilted her face to the floor again and nothing came out. She sighed and flipped back through the notebook. "So he didn't... doesn't... remember me? At all?"

Foggy looked back up again. She was still staring at the floor. It was like they were doing a dance, this conversation, this fragile relationship, but she only knew half the steps, and Foggy had two left feet.

"He really doesn't remember much of anything. And it's... it's hard to figure out what's going on in his head. Hell, he doesn't know, either. But he told me..." he sighed, short and quiet, "...he remembered 'office'. The word. No telling what else came along with it. 'Karen, office'."  He shrugged again. "It's really open to interpretation."

Matt made a sound, half of a snort and a quarter of a grumble and an eighth of a growl, and rolled onto his side, curling around Foggy's lower back like a protective wall. Foggy felt himself smiling, then reaching down to brush the tangled hair from his face so it wouldn't get sucked into his damn mouth.

That was his excuse, at least, and he'd take it to his _grave_. It was laughably vindictive, but he also made sure Karen could see it.

She saw it, and looked away. Her hand was fiddling with an imperfection at the edge of one of the pages. Then she spoke, voice low and nearly a whisper. "...Why did he save me, Foggy? From Eric? That alien?"

"You know the answer to that."

"Do I?"

"Don't make me explain it."

She sighed, and didn't. "I guess I owe him."

"Karen, you don't owe him anything. He doesn't know what 'owe' means. He saved you because you're _you_ , not to emotionally blackmail you." Foggy scoffed, still quiet. "That virus didn't take him away from me. And it won't take him away from you. Show him where you are, Karen. He'll find you."

Karen fell silent for a long time. Foggy went back to his book after a while, deciding not to push her. He'd pushed her enough already.

There was a whole goddamn page about dragging people's bodies around. Weird.

Foggy furrowed his eyebrows. A great deal of the book was basically _'Just get the motherfucker in the ambulance and your job is done'_ , which was fucking annoying. Yeah, he could drag Matt around on a towel, but how the fuck was he supposed to do the really crazy shit like pulling a goddamn screwdriver or something out of the fucker's eye?

Movement in front of him, and he lifted his head again. Karen, of course. She stood in front of the table for a while, hesitating, then let out a short breath and pointed at the busted CD player on the table. "Can I, uh...?"

"Have a party," Foggy said. "It doesn't work." And Matt was cuddling the headphones behind him-- hell if anyone was gonna wrestle those away from him.

"I know it doesn't." She bent and picked it up, almost as carefully as Matt had set it down. "Hold on," she said, straightening her back with a wince, and slipping quietly into the other room.

Foggy really didn't expect much. He went back to his book. _Airway Management._ He was pretty sure he knew CPR, at least. Matt had, anyway.

_'As an EMT-B you must open and maintain the airway in any patient who cannot do so for himself...'_ Yeah, but what about as a doctor? What about defense attorneys who unintentionally became doctors? Was there an addendum?

There was some crazy shit about a 'jaw thrust maneuver' that Foggy couldn't fucking figure out from the pictures. If only there was a video. He kept reading-- everything here kept assuming he had a fucking breathing mask or actual tools, not shit he'd cobbled together and used over and over to the point of disintegration. More pages, more pictures of implements he didn't fucking have. Rude.

Foggy skipped ahead. _Scene Size-up_. He was pretty sure he had that shit in the bag. His eyes stopped somewhere around _Body Substance Isolation_ and he was reading about how super careful he should be not to touch anyone's insides or let anyone spit blood into his mouth when there was a noise in front of him again, and he lifted his head.

He still hadn't expected much, and he certainly hadn't expected Karen to return twenty minutes after she'd left with the player's lid bent carefully back into place, the buttons lined up correctly with the frame, and the CD spinning easily inside.

"Here," she said, offering it back out.

Foggy took it, turning it over in his hands and trying to stop his jaw from dropping open. "You fixed it?"

Karen shrugged. "I'm, uh. I do a lot of guns, too. It's not really a big d--"

"Yeah, shut up." He turned and shook Matt's shoulder. "Hey, Napping Wonder. Get up."

Matt growled and pawed at his hand, pushing his face back into the mattress. He was an irritable little shit when he had to be woken up. "Ngh. Go'way." At least it sounded like _Go away_. Mostly, it was drool.

"Hey, I got you something. Well, Karen got you something." Another shoulder shake. "Come on, dude. Up."

"Ugh." Matt curled up tighter. Christ, it was like pulling him out of the fucking Matrix.

" _Up_ , Matt. Come on."

" _Ugh_. Yes. _I_ am." He rolled over, rubbing his face into Foggy's fucking hip before picking himself up and forcing himself into consciousness. Karen sighed-- Jesus, was she already starting to lose her patience? Well, tough fucking shit. She'd have to get used to it. Matt either did things slow as fucking hell or whip-fast and all at once.

"Here," Foggy said, putting the CD player in Matt's hands as soon as he was upright.

"Hunh?" It took him a few seconds to realize what it was, but as soon as he did, the smile from earlier spread across his face. A little hard to see with his hair covering most of it. Jesus, they needed to cut it. "It--...mmn. Good?"

"Yeah, buddy. Karen fixed it for you."

Matt rubbed the thumb of his right hand over the top of the player, along the little window, the tiny buttons. He twisted the headphone cord gently between his fingers, seeking out the port with the bottom of his thumb before plugging it in. There was music playing, tinny through the headphones, and he grinned, wide and bright, for a half-second.

He fiddled idly with the cable as he figured out what to say. "...Karen. Um. Thank you." He even lifted his head and tried his hardest to look at her, eyes landing somewhere near her shoulder.

"Uh. You're welcome." She was staring at the floor and totally missed it.

Foggy snorted. Mirrors. "Thank you, Karen. He was really bummed when he found it broken like that. I was gonna look for another one, but... you know. Leg."

"Uh-huh." Karen shifted on her feet. She didn't know what to do, so she did nothing.

Matt thought about something for a long minute, then stood up, holding the player out to her. Slow and cautious, with his right hand, like he still half-expected her to lunge at him. "Karen, um... listen?"

She stared at his feet. "...No, that's okay, Matt. That's yours. I fixed it for you."

He tapped his tongue between his lips, thinking. After a second, he spoke as clear as he could, as quickly as the words could leave him, afraid that she would lose patience and stop listening if he wasn't fast enough. "Share it."

She raised her head and Foggy locked eyes with her, and if he would have gotten away with it, he would have been gesturing wildly for her to take it. All he could really do was nod and hope it looked both encouraging and filled with the deadliest of warnings.

Karen, bless her, smiled her broken and wan little smile, and took it from him. It was like watching a fucking flower bloom. "Thank you, Matt."

It took Foggy a long minute to realize it was the first interaction they'd ever had that didn't involve crying or one of them scared shitless of the other. Matt was grinning again, like he had when Foggy had invited him out of the Park and into the shelter. That stupid earnest grin that made him look entirely too young and entirely not-feral.

And that time, Karen saw it. Foggy could have sworn he saw her go still, for just a fraction of a second, and he only hoped that she had stopped seeing him as an animal and more as what he really was: Matt Murdock, survivor of a devastating neurological virus, fighting his way back to humanity with little else but determination and one shitty ex-lawyer at his side.

And her, too, if she wanted.

Karen returned to her side of the room and Foggy to his, Matt stretching out behind him and finding the blanket that had been tossed over him as he'd slept. The fleece-soft texture was just as fascinating as it always was, apparently, and he pushed his thumbs across it, never losing that smile on his face.

Foggy spoke up. "Thanks, Karen. Really. I owe you one."

"You don't owe me anything," she said, quietly, and pulled the headphones onto her ears.

\---

Dinner was boring. Noodles in cold water and the last little box of cereal, which they all got a handful of before it was gone. Matt chewed the noodles when they were still crunchy, because he was starving-- literally-- but Karen sat and waited patiently for hers to soak before getting into them. Foggy ended up a little in-between. They tasted like wet cardboard.

After, he dug out the amoxicillin and made Matt take them, then found the cephalexin and doled out two to Karen and two to himself. Nobody threw them up afterward, which was an achievement.

It was going to start getting dark soon. Fucking winter and its fucking short daylight hours. Karen was in her spot and Matt was in his, sprawled out behind Foggy and taking up most of the damn futon. He had the headphones around his neck but the player was on the coffee table, too scared he might break it on accident, because, in his words: _Shake a lot_. They were lucky they'd gotten one with anti-skip built in.

All in all, though, Foggy could say he'd had a decent day, and he tried not to think about the last decent day he'd had, and how awfully and suddenly it had become the worst fucking night of his life.

"All right, let's kavitz," he said. "Let's figure out what the hell we're doing. I mean, in the long run."

"It's kibitz," Karen corrected.

"Close eno-- ugh."

Matt was staring at him. Well, at his stomach.

"Matty, no, don't even worry about that word, I don't know why I said it, and it is totally worthless--" he stopped, because Matt was looking at him with what he could only describe as a face he'd make if there was a knife in his chest. "Ugh. Kavi-- _kibitz_ means 'talk'. We gotta talk. About our plan."

"Kibitz," Matt repeated. He pronounced it _ka bit-sss_ , with the _s_ a weak and strangely extended afterthought. A lot of the words he said were extended at the end. "Foggy, thank you."

"You're welcome." He tried not to roll his eyes as he looked back over to Karen. "So, what the hell _are_ we doing? What's the end game, here?"

She was still making that strange half-paralyzed face that Foggy could only attribute to her wanting to smile or frown. "Well, this'll be where we've got to stay for a while. I mean, we should. If the purifier keeps working... there's no reason to go anywhere else."

"So we'll have plenty of water. Food, though. That was the last of these," he waggled the empty container of cereal in his hand before putting it back down on the table. Matt snatched it and started unfolding the cardboard. "...And the noodles. But that's it."

"Can't he find food?" Karen asked, pointing at Matt.

"Yes," Matt said immediately, folding an airplane.

"No," Foggy said at the same time, then puffed a short sigh when Matt glared at his arm. "I mean, yeah. He can. Not right now. Not enough for all of us, not with the amount of rubble out there. Not enough to keep us afloat for any long stretch of time. And let's not get started with whatever else might be wandering around."

"There's a pack of ferals out there somewhere."

"There's 'a pack of ferals' fucking everywhere, Karen."

Matt rolled the plane over in his palm. "Safe, Foggy."

"Um, no, do you remember counting seventeen goddamn aliens in the subway the other day? You're not going out scavenging, not by yourself. Not even with one of us. That's suicide."

"Suicide, what is this?"

"It means killing yourself," Foggy said, and Matt's eyebrows crumpled in thought. "And that is a very, very stupid thing to do, Matt, so no, you're not gonna go run around the city like a moron and get your throat cut open."

Matt grumbled. "Safe. Foggy."

" _Not_ safe, _Matty_. _So_ not fucking safe. And besides, your leg is still all fucked up. That has to heal before anything else."

Matt grunted-- vague agreement-- and went back to the cardboard.

Foggy sighed looked back over to Karen, jabbing a thumb at Matt and frowning. _This fucking guy_ , was what he was trying to impart to her, a thing he'd done a few times when the world was whole, in a dusty old office, with the hope that Matt wouldn't see it. Her lips were twitching again. Hell yes.

"Right. So, medical supplies, we've got those." He tossed the cephalexin across to her, and Matt's head tilted unconsciously to follow the sound. "Keep taking these. Two in the morning, two at night, Karen."

"...And call you in the morning?" she asked, after fumbling the catch.

"No. I'll be on vacation," Foggy said.

A noise came out of her that wasn't a word or a grunt. It sounded half-strangled. Was she trying to laugh?  Fuck yes. "Uh. Oh, uh, are you on... do you have vitamins?"

"I wish. Just medications."

Karen eased herself down to dig through her bag. "I've got, uh. They're not much and they taste like shit, but..." she pulled out a large white bottle and threw it awkwardly across the room.

Foggy missed. Matt caught it out of the air for him, quick and easy, a reflex, without breaking his focus from the plane in his other hand.

"How come none of us can throw worth a shit?" Foggy asked, plucking the bottle from Matt's hand. Flinstone's Vitamins, how adorable. As long as it kept them from dying of some sort of awful deficiency. Or scurvy.

"My back's ripped up. That's my excuse. What's yours?"

"Give me time to come up with something badass," Foggy said, pushing at the childproof cap to get at the stuff inside. A cloying, sugary smell met his nose. He poured a few out. They looked like pieces of sidewalk chalk. "Matt, here." He leaned over and brushed a knuckle along the underside of Matt's good hand, and his response was quick and reflexive, rolling his hand palm-upward so Foggy could place the things inside. "Eat 'em."

Matt ate them immediately and his face twisted up in disgust almost before they were on his tongue. "Ugh, Foggy. Tastes."

"They aren't that bad." He popped a few in his mouth. They _were that bad_. It was like a bird had taken a shit on chalk and it had sat to fossilize for about ten million years. "Jesus. Gross."

"I told you they tasted like shit," Karen said. Smiling. At their misery and pain, of course, because she totally would. "Do you think vitamins expire?"

"Well, the flavor certainly does," Foggy grumbled, wrestling the water cup away from Matt. "Don't hog it, asshole."

"Hog, what i--"

"It means you're drinking it all like a greedy bastard."

"Greedy, wha--"

"It means you gotta share."

Matt blinked a few times, then got up and went into the kitchen, coming out with another cup. He handed it carefully over. "Sorry. Didn't... mm, mean." Why did he look like he'd just made the most monumental screw-up in the history of mankind?

Oh, right, because he was Matt.

Foggy took the water anyway, drank half, and gave the rest back. "There. Dude, stop looking like you just stabbed me. It's not a big deal." Matt did not believe him, glaring somewhere near his knee. He huffed and went back to his airplane. "God, maybe we should compound it and inject it. That might be better than putting this shit in my mouth."

"You're being dramatic," Karen said. Still smiling.

So Foggy kept talking. "Look, I'm good at it, all right? I should have been an actor. Now I'm just a doctor. A really shitty doctor."

"I'd say you're probably the best in New York."

"'Cause all the rest are dead? That makes me the best in the States, for _sure_. I should be asking for tenure. Extra vacation days. Man, how about a _yacht?"_

There were so many unknown words in Matt's vocabulary being thrown around that he didn't know which one to ask about first. He huffed and threw the plane instead.

Karen watched as it sailed easily over the table and landed in front of her couch. She grabbed it with her socked foot instead of bending over, pulling it up onto the cushions so she could get it in her hands. "A yacht, huh?" Her fingers straightened out the uneven edges of the wings. "Foggy... do you remember that boat Jack was talking about?"

"Uh, yeah." Oh, great. Why'd she have to bring that shit up? They were doing so good. Now he had the memory clawing to the front of his head again. "The one that fucking killed him?"

"I don't think the boat killed him."

"You know what I mean."

Karen threw the plane, but she did it all wrong, her movements too rough, and it spiraled down to the carpet. Matt scrambled up to get it back. "You know, they never actually got to it. It's supposed to be a military cache."

"What would even be inside it?" Foggy leaned over so he wouldn't take an elbow to his face when Matt came flopping back onto the futon. "We've never seen... well, I've never seen one. This guy's never smelled one."

Even without his name as a cue, Matt knew he was being talked about. "Hunh?"

"A military cache, Matt. We've never found one of those."

"Military cache, what is this?"

Karen answered for both of them. "They keep a lot of different shit in them. Army supplies, you know. Mostly, food. MREs. That's what kept the shelter going for so long. Hell, we lived on military rations for _months_ before we ran out."

Foggy rubbed his neck. "So... there's a bunch of shit out there... on a boat."

"In the Hudson."

"Did you ever see it?"

"From the shore. I know where it is. Hell, Eric and I _found_ it."

"It's _in_ the river? How _far_ in?" Oh, this sounded like some bad juju. No good things had ever happened to him when the fucking river was involved.

"Far. We were thinking we could take another boat out to it, but we couldn't find one that hadn't been fucked up by the water." Her face was set, eyes bright. There was an idea in her head and she was letting it out.

Foggy had never seen Karen so clearly before now. "So, what? We find a boat, we can sail to the island of lost treasure and feed ourselves for a month?"

" _Months_ , Foggy. You said yourself you don't want Matt out there alone."

"I don't."

"It's an option," Karen said. "An easy one. And there could be more than just MREs. Guns, medical supplies, basically all the war-time shit they failed to drag up here."

"How do you know it hasn't been picked clean?"

"I don't, really. But it hasn't moved and I've never seen anyone out there."

" _Something's_ out there. It fucking killed Jack."

"An alien killed Jack. A scout. I don't think he was anywhere near the bridge when it happened."

Foggy watched the airplane slip through the air again and land next to Karen on the couch. "The bridge? It's near the bridge?"

Karen threw the plane back. This time, it skipped off the table and landed between it and the futon. Matt was thrilled. "Yeah. The Washington."

He chewed on his tongue as Matt reached down and fished it out of the gap. "How close to the bridge is it?"

"Uh, probably two hundred feet or so. Why?"

The airplane sailed through the air again. Foggy looked at Matt, who was hunched up and smiling as he waited for Karen to throw it back, tapping his fingers on his knees with a sort of pent-up energy that he'd always gotten back in 6A. When she threw it again, she overshot, and he bounced up and snatched it out of the air.

Foggy looked back at Karen. "I have an idea."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _So I'll scream 'til I die and the last of those bad thoughts are finally out._  
>  The Avett Brothers


	16. hopeless wanderer

"You know," Karen said, wringing out a rag, "for a second, I thought you were considering _flying_ over there."

"That might have, uh," Foggy's voice was a mumble as he dumped a bucket of frigid water on Matt, who whined and clawed at the oily black mess all over his skin, "been a better idea."

\---

He should have written it as a list. Then he would have seen how stupid the plan was, once he'd laid it all out.

\---

_Step one: check out the boat._

\---

Karen blew out a sigh as she put the truck in park and turned the engine off. It hadn't been much of a drive, but Matt was turning a nice shade of green that went brilliantly with the color of the sky.

"You gonna puke?" Foggy asked, leaning across him to pop the door open.

"Hnrgh."

"Your words, Matt. Use your words."

Matt tumbled out of the truck and leaned over his knees, gentle with the left one, taking deep breaths. Well, he still knew how to do that, apparently. Maybe it was an action guided by instinct, to keep the calories in his gut where they belonged. Either way, he managed to fight back the nausea, and was openly grinning when he straightened back up.

"Your words," he said, and his grin became way too shit-eating for it to be anything else but Matt being a snarky-- no. Just Matt being Matt. He tilted his head back as a breeze coasted over the road, through the truck and their clothes and hair. It smelled like sewage and decay. Matt took a deep breath, anyway, his hair flicking all across his face. "Foggy."

"Hm?" He was currently dragging his bag out of the backseat, because _hell_ if he was going to be caught in a shitty situation without medical supplies again. This shit was gonna get stapled to his damn arms if that was how it had to be.

"Foggy, I want."

"Want what?" he hauled the bag onto his shoulder, and crawled carefully out of the truck. His leg made him bite at his tongue when he extended it, and he could feel the stitches pulling, foreign objects that he couldn't ignore. Getting better, though. A decent amount of sleep and a bit of rest had helped loads. If only he could have gotten more than the slivers of time they'd had to work with.

Matt was leaning toward him, still grinning, eyes darting somewhere around the truck's gas cap cover. "Go away," he said. "Move. Can I, Foggy?"

"Your knee--"

"Good. It is... mm... good. Foggy." Fuck, he had the alacrity to interrupt. That meant it was pretty goddamned important. Matt fumbled his shivering fingers along the side of the truck. "Foggy, can I?"

He blew out a loud sigh. "Ugh. Yes. Slow--"

Matt was already closing the space between them, pushing their foreheads together.

"--Ly. _Matt_." He dug his fingers into Matt's hair tightly to try to keep him still. His own reflexes were somehow still trying to make eye contact, but Matt's eyes were flicking around all over and tracking absolutely dick, as always. "Slowly!"

A single huffing laugh came from his mouth, and he reached up and untangled Foggy's hand, and then he was fucking gone. Like a gunshot. And Jesus fucking Christ, he hadn't lost an ounce of his speed despite the wound, despite the lack of food, despite the excess of fatigue. Prick.

"You heard me, you little shit. _Slowly!"_

Matt laughed again and started climbing up onto a cluster of abandoned cars. Foggy pushed his hands down his face and tried not to groan.

"Uh, he's not going to like... run away, is he?" Karen asked as she came around from the front of the truck, her rifle in one hand and Foggy's in the other.

"He'll come back. He's just gonna run around like a fucking maniac." Still, it was something Foggy had been looking forward to, and now that he could see the big stupid grin on Matt's face as he darted around and jumped on shit, he found that he didn't want to see it fade away. "He's fine."

"'Kay." Karen held out his rifle. "I cleaned it for you. Don't get shit in the barrel again."

Foggy took it and hauled it over his shoulder with the rest of his stuff. "That wasn't shit, it was mud."

She rolled her eyes and made a rather explicit jack-off motion with one hand, turning away and heading down into the parking lot she'd brought them next to. The river lay just beyond, as black and disgusting as ever. This close, the smell was so strong that it felt like a film that was adhering to their skin. "Come on," she said, leading him toward the water. "It's just down here."

Something clattered loudly over where Matt was, and Foggy looked to see him digging through the trunk space of an old sedan. He remembered how to scavenge, apparently.

"You find anything, Matty?"

"...No," was the faint reply.

The Hudson rippled under their feet as they approached the edge of the lot. A chilly breeze swept around them and Foggy huddled deeper into his jacket. It was sunny out, the sky pale green, but it didn't do jack shit for the cold. There were some clouds, further out, curling weakly over the bones of the city across the river. Dark grey and unwelcoming. Foggy doubted rain. It'd been a long time since there'd been rain.

"Well, there it is," Karen said, gesturing.

The cargo ship was partially tilted to one side, laying out in the middle of the water. Foggy put his duffel bag down and lifted his rifle, studying it through the scope. About half of the ship came up over the surface of the river, big metal containers laying haphazardly all over the place. Some of them had the insignia of the United States still visible on them.

Foggy kept looking, noting the way the river hissed at the sides of the boat. There was a permanent black stain coating everything the water had touched. Nothing moved besides the water, licking weakly at the sides of the containers and the ship's hull. "...Nobody's been out to it?"

"Not that I'm aware of. The water's too dangerous."

"Only if we swim in it." He turned to get a look at the bridge-- crumbled, most of it also in the river. The ship was about a hundred feet out from it. Concrete pilings and lost cargo containers and half-submerged cars dotted the entire area. He was reminded of a game he'd played as a kid. What was that, The Floor Is Lava?

Well, the floor was fucking disgusting black sludge now.

Foggy dropped the rifle and rubbed his face, trying to work out the logistics. It might be possible. _Might._

Karen stepped up next to him. "Do you think he can do it?"

\---

_Step two: see if Matt can possibly get to said boat._

\---

"I don't know. Maybe. There's a lot of gaps." He hissed out a loud sigh and turned his head. "Matt, come here!" Foggy didn't raise his voice, because he didn't have to. It probably looked strange.

But Matt heard him, of course, and came huffing back to them with a shockingly yellow purse in his arms, that stupid-ass grin still plastered all over his face. "Foggy. I found." He deposited it in Foggy's hands.

"Oh, thanks. It's... cute."

"Inside," Matt said.

Foggy looked. He had no idea how Matt managed some of the shit he did, but this one was obvious the second he opened the purse-- a sickly-sweet smell rushed into his nose, a stirring pot of chemicals and something he slowly identified as some sort of air freshener-y bullshit. What was that, cinnamon? Apples? What did apples smell like, again? "Candles, Matty?"

"Candles," he repeated, slowly. A new word.

"Yeah. You light them up. Like a lantern."

Matt blinked. "Yes. Can't s-see. Mm. Like I-- _like_ me."

"Yeah, you got that right." Foggy felt himself smiling, anyway, because that meant Matt understood that he saw the world differently, and that was _really fucking important_. And a good example of Matt's intelligence. Pride flared warm in his chest.

Karen's face almost twitched into a smile. Almost. So close. "That's a good color on you, Foggy. You look very distinguished."

"Distinguished, what is this?"

Foggy gave the purse to Karen. "It means you look like you haven't been living in mud for the past two years. So, impossible. She's lying."

Matt tilted his head. "No. Not lie."

"Shh! God, you just take the fun out of everything," Foggy groaned, then hooked his fingers along Matt's shoulder and turned him gently toward the boat. "Out there, buddy. In the river. Can you... uh, can you see it?" Another prod toward Matt's problem-solving skills, because he couldn't see, at least not in the way a dictionary would describe it.

But Matt saw, just not with his eyes. The slow smile didn't drop from his face. "...Yes. See a lot. Foggy, what is this?"

"It's a boat."

"Boat?"

"Do you know what that is?"

He hummed, stepping closer to the waterline. "Yes."

Well, that was something, at least. How was he familiar with it? Didn't matter right now. "Okay. There's something in it. Can you tell what it is from here?"

Matt tilted his head, eyes flicking around. It took him a long minute to answer. "Foggy, no. Not, um. Not a lot. Far." He chewed on his lip, eyebrows pushing together in confusion as he got his own words in the wrong order. "A lot. Far. T... t-too _far_." The water was probably fucking him up too. Crap. "Foggy, why?"

"It's important. Can you tell where the bridge is at?"

"Bridge?"

"Yep. A bridge is a road. Over water."

Matt shifted on his feet again, listening. Karen and Foggy watched as his head tilted to listen, right alongside the twitch the virus had torn through him, pinpointing sounds, triangulating on them, building the image in his head. "Foggy, yes." He gestured toward it, where it sat half-crumpled in the water. "There."

"Awesome, Matt. Do you think you can get on that bridge, and down to that boat? Can you do it without getting yourself killed?"

Matt smiled a little. "Yes." He shifted on his feet.

Really, that should have been Foggy's first warning.

He didn't listen to it. "Okay, great. Let's g-- shit, _fuck_ , Matt--!"

Foggy lurched forward to grab him but he was too slow, and Matt was taking off, a dead sprint in the direction of the bridge. There wasn't a chance he could catch up, but Foggy powered after him with a harsh huff anyway. Too bad his fucking leg was worthless as balls and he had to stop after a pathetic six steps. "You _asshole!_ Not yet!"

"Be okay, Foggy!" Matt yelled back, not even winded, and he kept fucking going.

"Oh, my God," he hissed, rubbing his face with both hands. Karen jogged past him, but she wasn't gonna catch Matt, either. Nobody could catch him. Not even a _virus_ could catch the stupid fucking asshole. "You fuck! Matt, get ba--" he stopped yelling when he realized that Matt was not going to come back, and screaming his stupid head off out here was a good way to get a pack of ferals at his throat. "Jesus!"

Matt was already at the goddamn bridge.

\---

_Step three (optional): watch in total horror as Matt takes off like a fucking bottle rocket. Bye, Matt._

\---

"Jesus," Karen breathed, her sharp sigh mirroring how Foggy felt, and it sounded like she was half in awe at Matt's speed and maybe, if he listened hard enough, half worried about Matt's safety. "What do we do?"

"Uh, pray that he doesn't drown, or fall and break his fucking neck." Foggy rubbed his face, and wiped his nose, as if that would dissipate the smell. It didn't. "God, he is a fucking idiot sometimes."

And there he went, Foggy's stupid idiot feral best friend, scrambling up onto the twisted and half-sunken support strut of the bridge, making his way easily down it. Slipping along the top of the crisscrossing metal, toward the water, moving quick and graceful like his feet weren't touching it at all.

He heard Karen try to hide the fact that she'd made a little gasping noise, and grunted. "You've never seen him doing this shit, huh?" He'd seen it so many times that it could have been a mundane thing. It wasn't.

"Not since... uh. Before all this. The apartment. And that was mostly dark."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot about that."

"I didn't."

"Well, _he_ did, so don't feel too bad."

Matt started climbing along on one of the main pilings, which was half in the water like everything else, pausing every few moments to get his bearings. The concrete of the road itself had gone in, sideways, but it was chopped to pieces, splintering and eroding over the two years it had been laying there. Matt climbed to the top edge, what actually used to be the side of the road, and he paused again. It looked like he didn't have anywhere to go, with the road all segmented, but then he surged forward and leapt across the gap to another section, a good six fucking feet, right over the thrashing river and everything churning within it, landing lightly on the edge like fate Herself had gently deposited him there.

"Jesus," Karen said. She sounded like she was going to have a fucking heart attack.

Foggy was right behind her. "Dickhead. He would have gone even if there weren't supplies on the boat." Not that it was guaranteed that there _were_. Foggy tried to be supportive. Calming. It sounded weak and sick because he felt the exact opposite. "...He knows what he's doing, Karen, don't worry."

"Yeah, I'm just seeing 'blind guy on a broken bridge' right now."

At that, he _did_ scoff. "Please. He can see that shit better than either of us." Foggy grunted. His leg was fucking agony. He moved slowly, down to the edge of the road, and sat down, settling his feet carefully on the blackened rocks. He spun a finger in the air. "Three-hundred sixty degrees, did you know that? He's got like a fucking sonar."

Karen didn't sit. He could hear the nervousness in her voice as she watched Matt double back, and take a different path to get closer to the river's surface, hopping down a scattered staircase of cars and asphalt, then yanking himself up onto a piece of jutting rebar to reach another broken column of concrete that leaned into the water. "How can you watch this and not shit yourself?"

"Uh, no, I'm shitting myself." He couldn't take his eyes off of Matt, either. The second he glanced elsewhere, he knew his friend would be in the water. "Don't worry. He's in _so_ much fucking trouble when he gets back."

"Oh, good. How do you even discipline a feral?" she asked, apparently just realizing she still had the purse in her hands. If he was looking, he was sure he'd laugh at the sight, but watching to see if Matt went face-first in the river and drowned was more important. She placed it on the road next to him.

"I'm not disciplining a feral. I'm disciplining my idiot best friend, Matt." Foggy grabbed the purse. Distraction. For his hands. So he didn't clench them or eat his fingernails and give himself a nail bed infection. "And grounding. Lots of grounding."

"You can ground him?"

"You bet your bullshit I can ground his stupid ass."

"'Bet your bullshit'," Karen repeated, unable to hide the nervous humor in her tone.

Matt was moving along the top of the bridge-- still actually the side of the road-- and hopping along the breaks in the concrete like he was skipping over cracks in a goddamn sidewalk. He was limping, just slightly. Foggy could tell. He could always fucking tell.

"Fucking asshole," he said, and wished he had more curse words to throw around so he wouldn't repeat himself. "He tightroped on a power line once, back in the Kitchen. Power grid was down, obviously." He started digging through the different types of candles in the purse. "He knew, of course. He can hear them when they're on. _'Foggy, you worry too much, I know what I'm doing!'"_

"That's a horrible impression."

"Yeah, you should hear his impression of me."

"Any good?"

"What do you think? Fucker's got hearing like you wouldn't believe. I bet he could play _Bohemian Rhapsody_ by ear... well, if he could play an instrument." He scoffed. "It sucks, actually. He's not good at... not being himself."

Karen still didn't relax. "Well, at least that's one thing that carried over. From the virus."

Foggy's face twisted as it tried to smile while it was still sporting a heavy frown. He put a candle up to his nose. The label said lavender and sage, but it smelled like ass and pickles. "There's a lot that he got to keep. You just don't see it 'cause you don't... didn't know him. Like I do. The little things."

Matt was moving carefully _down_ the concrete now, along a thin jutting switchback, toward the surface of the water. The wind was blowing harder out there; Foggy could see his hair and the hood of his jacket whipping around. He got to about water level, clutching onto a piece of rebar with his good hand as he perched easily alongside the wall. A few cargo containers lay nearby. He stopped for a second, apparently to choose which one to hop to first.

Karen made a weird sound as he pushed himself off of the concrete and landed easily. The noise of his feet hitting the hollow container echoed weakly back to them. "God. Okay." Wow, she was freaked. At least Foggy had that much going for him. Worried about the feral bastard she'd wanted dead less than a week ago. "...Like what?" she asked, rushed, like she was eager to have something else to think about-- except she'd still be thinking about Matt because that's who she was asking about. Weirdo. "...What little things?"

"Well. He drools in his sleep." She knew that. "Uh. If you don't stop him chewing his nails, he'll do it so much he'll give himself an infection. He hates the smell of menthol cigarettes and loves the sound of wind on windowpanes."

"Oh, it's so romantic, you know all that." The words were there, but the actual inflection of sarcasm was not. It sounded as weird as it always did.

Foggy thought he heard the sound of Matt's feet hitting metal again as he jumped over to another container, slipped once on the water-slick surface-- they both made a noise-- then recovered easily, and moved to the next one after another pause. Checking to see if any would sink if he stepped on them, probably. Yeah, Foggy was gonna have a coronary.

He fought his heart failure down with more talking. "It's not really that romantic. The cigarettes will make him puke and the wind will make him fall asleep." Foggy put the candle back and chose another one. Apples and cinnamon. No, burnt plastic and expired Oreos. "Didn't sleep much, before... you know. The virus."

"He, uh. Does he dream?"

"No. I think you have to have memories to dream."

Matt was making his way steadily across. All grace and reflex, as always. Foggy could tell he was enjoying it, just in the way he carried himself. Even from this distance, he could see the dumb grin still on his face. Relaxed and focused. Motherfucker.

Karen's voice got very small and very afraid. It sounded like she'd been thinking about her next words for a long time. "You do... you do a lot for him. More than, uh... anyone else... anyone else would." She followed up with a soft, "You know?" like it was some sort of punctuation that would make her question more casual.

It didn't. "What?" An uneven word hidden inside a baffled laugh. "I don't do _shit_. He's doing all this on his own. I'm just teaching him words, that's all. He's smarter than you give him credit for. Seriously."

"Nobody else would do something like that, though. Not for him. Not for a... a feral."

"Karen, nobody's doing anything for anyone. We're partners, we've always been. Do I look like I mind? I know it seems like it sometimes, but... I don't. I really don't." Another candle. Vanilla. Close enough, this time. "And if you tell Matt I said that, I will give you so many fucking Indian burns."

Matt finally reached the boat by sliding down a half-sunken shipping container and pushing himself off of it at the last second, latching onto the edge of the ship's railing with what looked like barely centimeters to spare. It was hard to tell from the shoreline. He hauled himself up over the railing and stopped to breathe. Foggy had to stop to make sure his stupid heart was still beating.

\---

_Step four (optional): watch as Matt, indeed, gets to said boat, despite being told explicitly to not go to said boat because_ fucking knee injury.

\---

Karen didn't move at all. "I won't tell him, don't worry."

"I don't _care_ what's wrong with him, Karen. It doesn't matter. He's lived through everything else, and come out stronger, and it'll be the same way now with this stupid virus. You'll see."

"He's... he's come far. Already." Her words were weak. This wasn't something she wanted to admit. Hell, this wasn't even something she wanted to talk about. Tough fucking titties. And Foggy knew it was his fault, but he was just thrilled she was talking, _period._

"No shit. When he found me in the Park, he couldn't talk at all. He started up before we got back. It's still Matt, in there. He might be a little hard to see, sometimes, but he's in there." He sighed. "Matt knows exactly what he is, Karen. He knows he's not... like us. That he's broken, that he's dangerous, that he's frightening. But he's still there. Look closer. He wants you to see him."

Karen's response was so quiet, it might have been the wind. "...I will."

Matt was wandering around on the slanted deck of the ship, moving from container to container, stopping at each one with a hand on the outside, focusing. The wind continued to blow around him, shifting his hair all over, pushing the jacket away from his body. He tilted his head up toward the sky, and Foggy could tell he was enjoying the wind. He was enjoying being out there. _Free_.

"Foggy." Karen's voice was so soft. "Do you..." she stopped, fell silent for a long moment, and then eventually, she forced out words that were so quiet, he thought he'd misheard her. "...Do you love him?"

Foggy just smiled humorlessly at nothing, rolling the candle around in his hands. It didn't take him long to answer. "He's mine. I'm his."

"It's that simple?"

"Yeah. It is that simple."

They both fell quiet after that, watching Matt move around on the boat. He checked every single container that wasn't in the water, and then disappeared for a long couple of minutes. Foggy didn't hear splashing or shouting, and he was trying to stop his heart from racing as he stood back up. As if that'd help him see better. It didn't.

Then Matt popped back up again, a bag over his shoulder. A bigass military duffel. He'd found _something_. Foggy's worry that he was going to die in the river was still outweighing his need for supplies. Any supplies. Fuck them, he just wanted Matt _away from the river_.

Matt started back the way he came, faster and more confident now that he had the path worked out. Hopping over the boat railing, slipping down the sides of the half-submerged containers, leaping across the water like he didn't even care that it was beneath him. He probably didn't.

Karen watched every movement, every jump and twist and step with a strange look over her face. Foggy kept himself standing despite the twinging in his leg, and waited.

Matt got back to the shore in half the time he'd taken to get out, landing on the stained gravel with very little noise, like he only weighed a quarter of what he actually did. Fearless. The grin on his face hadn't budged by a fraction as he started back toward them.

"Foggy," he panted, as he finally got to where they stood.

"You're a fucking idiot, Matt," was what Foggy said, but Matt just kept on with that stupid face in his direction and crossed the rest of the distance. Foggy met him halfway, of course, because he was a pathetic sucker, and let Matt bump and lean against his forehead. He smelled like death. "You're in _so_ much fucking trouble, you prick asshole."

"'Kay." Matt didn't seem worried; he pulled the duffel off his shoulder and dropped it in Foggy's arms. "I got." Another heavy couple of gasps as he got his breath back, and then he grinned harder, trying very hard to make his eyes land somewhere on Foggy's face. "I got you. S-somethin'," he eked out.

Foggy was brought back to a dusty apartment. Easy grins and complex speech. Plateaus and paper balls. He felt his insides twist and swallowed the feeling down, rocking the bag in his arms and taking a sharp breath. It was heavy. Full of supplies. Or food. Something useful. Something that was going to keep them alive.

And just like that, his fury at Matt snapped in half and disintegrated.

Total fucking prick.

Karen came around, pulling a bottle of water from her backpack and offering it out to Matt. He tilted his head at her, for a moment unsure of what to do, then his grin dropped into a gentle smile and he took it. Right hand. He never used the other one when interacting with her.

"Karen. Thank you."

She mumbled something under her breath that Foggy couldn't hear but Matt could. Matt kept smiling and started inhaling the water. Well, drinking it real goddamn fast. Foggy didn't want to think about inhaling water right now.

Karen came around and helped dig through the duffel bag. The whole thing was stuffed with beige plastic bags, top to bottom. Most of the writing was hidden under the filmy black residue left by the water; she rubbed one clean with the corner of her jacket sleeve and let out a sharp breath. "MRE," she said, putting it aside. "They're all MREs."

\---

_Step five (optional): have a heart attack as Matt returns with his backpack stuffed to the brim with MREs._

\---

"MREs," Matt huffed, wiping his mouth, "what is this?"

"Meals, ready to eat. Those things you got."

"Mm. Food."

"Yeah! That's a good thing." Foggy didn't try to wipe the grin from his face as he hovered next to his friend, slapping his shoulder gently. "You hit the jackpot, buddy. You're awesome."

Matt grinned abashedly at the ground with his huffing little laugh, rolling the water bottle between his hands. Ecstatic. So fucking happy to have done something to help. Something other than trying to talk with his failing mind. Something other than being a _chore_. "Foggy, good?"

Foggy wasn't sure Matt could be anything else. "Dude, you have no idea. This is... this is gonna save our asses, man." Jesus, they'd be able to eat something other than noodles for once. The thought of having something with actual taste to it was making his mouth water already. He looked over at Karen. She was smiling, not talking, but there was a tightness around her eyes. He couldn't tell what it was.

"Foggy, a lot," Matt said, gesturing to the boat with the water bottle.

"A lot?"

"A lot, um. This. MREs." _Emaries_. Awkward emphasis on the second syllable. He gestured to the duffel bag.

"More MREs, Matty? How many?"

"More. A lot."

"Good, that's good. Was there anything else?"

He picked at his chin, frowning softly in concentration, eyes darting. This was going to be the hard part: Matt finding words to describe what else he'd found on the ship. Good thing Foggy had a ton of practice at being his interpreter.

"Were there boxes inside the containers?"

"Yes. A lot. Um. Uh. Metal. Metal, inside."

"What kind? Tools?"

"No. Mm. Smells. Um... the word."

"Tell me more, Matty, we'll figure it out together. Bad smell? Good smell?"

"Bad. Hurts."

"It smells like it _hurts?"_

"Yes."

"Needles? Medicine?"

"No."

"Explosives?"

"Mm, no. B... b..." he waved the water bottle at the rifle slung over Foggy's shoulder.

"Bullets?"

"Yes!" A flash-fire of a surprised, relieved smile. " _Bull_ ets. A lot."

"Okay, bullets. Guns? Any of those?"

"Um. Yes. I, um. Guns _inside_."

"That's good. Could you tell what kind?"

"Like, mm... Foggy, like... this one." He motioned to Karen's rifle. It was a fair bit bigger than Foggy's and in far better condition.

"That rifle?"

"Yes. A lot, uh." Matt motioned with his hands, forming a vague spherical shape with closed fingers, then extended them to make the shape larger.

"Higher caliber?"

"Caliber?"

"That means the size. Were they bigger than Karen's rifle, Matt?"

"Mm, yes. Big-...big _ger_."

Karen watched them go back and forth silently. There was something else on her face that Foggy still couldn't work out. It was almost a look that she may have given Matt far before the world fell down, far before the virus had taken him. A motherfucking flower blooming, goddamn.

Foggy looked back at Matt. "Did they all have guns in them, Matty?"

"No. Others, the... the word." He gestured with his hands again-- mapping it out for them, just like he had at the shelter. This time, it was something flat on top and round on bottom. "Boat. Up."

"The deck?"

"Yes!" Another word he had a definition for now, filed away quietly in that scattered, ruined filing system he had for a head. "The d-d-deck. B-by _the_ deck. Guns. MREs."

Finally, Karen said something. "Maybe we should try to get out there ourselves."

Foggy shrugged. "With what? Another boat?"

"Yeah. If we can find one.  Somewhere.  Maybe." Yeah, if there was a useful boat anywhere within a twenty-mile radius, they wouldn't have needed to send a goddamned feral out to gather the shit.  She crossed her arms. "We haven't got a whole lot of rounds for my rifle. And yours-- .308-- we've only got about two dozen." Not a great number if aliens decided to peel that apartment open like a can of sardines.

Matt bent down and grabbed the duffel, turning it over and spilling the plastic packages out all over the road.

Foggy glared. "Matty, don't you fucking _dare_."

"Be okay, Foggy."

He reached out and snagged the duffel bag; Matt held onto his end and frowned. "You're not going back out there, Matt. You're gonna get yourself hurt."

\---

_Step six (optional): try to stop Matt from going back for more._

\---

Matt pinned his tongue between his lips. "Karen needs."

"Karen can fucking wait."

And of course Karen didn't say anything, didn't attempt to abort Matt's movements, didn't tell him that no, she really didn't need another gun right now, they could do just fine with what they had until Matt's leg got better and there was less of a chance of him drowning. She didn't budge or speak.

So Matt jerked his head-- an attempt at a shrug that was mostly a twitch-- and yanked the duffel out of Foggy's hand. Before he could get stopped again, he turned and took off, another flat sprint that listed gently to one side because of his leg.

"Matt, God fucking dammit!"

\---

_Step seven (optional): try not to scream your head off when he goes back for more._

\---

Matt just waved.

Foggy whirled on the only other target he had for his anger. "Karen, you fucking idiot, he's gonna get himself killed out there."

She just sighed. "Jesus, you said yourself that he knows what he's doing."

"He's going out there for _you_ , he's putting himself in danger for _you_ , Karen!" He started digging around in his pockets for the stupid-ass dog whistle, even though he wasn't sure Matt would recognize it, or know what it meant. Foggy stopped before blowing into it. What if it disoriented him and made him fall?

"Yeah? He puts himself in danger for you, too, but that's allowed?"

"That's-- that's different, Karen."

"No, it's not," she said, crossing her arms. She stared out at the bridge again; Foggy followed her gaze. Matt was hopping over the segmented, vertical concrete already. "It's exactly the same."

Ugh. Fucking Karen and her stupid fucking logic. Foggy pawed at his face, blasting out a breath through his fingers. Okay, he could do this. Matt could do this. He'd done it once already so it wasn't impossible. It was going to be okay.

And, yeah, Matt got to the boat in a fraction of the time it had taken him for the first run. He started digging around somewhere they couldn't see, and appeared a short minute later, a huge fucking assault rifle in one hand and the duffel hanging down heavily over his shoulder.

Matt started back, grinning again.

Okay. Okay. He could do it. Foggy knew he could do it.

He was halfway across one of the cargo containers when his footing slipped, just once, on the water-slick surface. Matt tried to correct himself, but faltered on his bad leg, either the wound on his knee or the tremor, and tumbled backwards into the drink with a high yelp and a faint splash.

\---

_Step eight (mandatory): actually scream your head off when his fucked-up knee-slash-tremory-bullshit-leg trips him up and tosses him into the fucking river with a sound and image that will totally be a permanent memory to dust off and proudly place with all the others._

\---

"Oh, shit, _fuck_ , he went in," Foggy said, needlessly, lurching forward, the pain in his leg forgotten and two separate emotions flaring bright and blistering in his chest. "Oh, God, Jesus, God," he whined, high-pitched like his friend in the river. "I gotta-- I gotta--"

Karen's hands landed on his arm and she yanked him back. "Hey, hey, hey, don't--"

"This is your fault! _This is your fucking fault!"_ His eyes burned but he didn't feel it, tearing himself out of her grasp and stumbling, clumsy, toward the water.

Again, she grabbed him. "Foggy, stop, _stop_ \--"

"This was stupid! This was so fucking stupid, why did I come up with this, why did I think this was a good plan?!" he was rambling, eyes locked on the weakly churning black water that had just swallowed his _fucking friend_. "Why didn't you stop him, Karen?! Why-- why did--"

"Calm down! Just calm down, Foggy--"

He was about two seconds from throwing Karen to the ground. His voice was strangled and it cracked and sounded weak and stupid and awful. "He's not coming up. He's not coming back up. Oh my God, Karen, he's--"

"You're not going in there too, you idiot!"

Foggy growled and shoved at her, but Jesus, she was stronger than she fucking looked, her arms all muscle as they got themselves around his chest and stopped him from diving face first into the mess swirling at his feet. He struggled, panicking, making a noise that sounded a lot like his _drowning best friend in the fucking Hudson, Karen, get the_ fuck _off--_

"Stop! Look! There he is, Foggy, there he is, do you see him?"

\---

_Step nine (mandatory): cry until he surfaces. (Forty-five long,_ long _seconds.)_

\---

There he was, coughing and flailing and dragging himself up out of the water and onto one of the cargo containers. The water painted him and his clothing monotone. Even from the shoreline, Foggy could see it dripping off of him. He hunched over on himself on the top of the container and didn't move.

The gun was still in his fucking hand.

Foggy started shouting. He didn't care if there were fucking eighty ferals nearby that could hear him. He didn't care if there was a whole legion of goddamn aliens waiting somewhere. "Matt! _Matt!_ Come back!"

Matt lifted his head but didn't get up.

So Karen started screaming, too, and then Matt got to his feet and started off, moving sluggishly, clearly disoriented. Foggy couldn't fucking breathe-- he might as well have been in the water himself for how well he was doing at _that_ shit.

Matt moved toward the bridge, slowly, tumbling onto one of the containers, where he stopped again. He was breathing hard, and Foggy couldn't tell if he could actually see Matt spitting out river water or if the distance between them was distorting the image.

But he wasn't moving, and he had to fucking _move_ or he was going to _fucking die_. Out on the water, alone. They wouldn't even be able to retrieve his body.

His voice screamed out of him before he could stop himself. "Get up, Matt!" He cupped his hands round his mouth. "Get _up!_ Keep moving!"

Matt got to his feet again, uneven, adjusting the rifle in one hand and the duffel over his shoulder. He was staggering and clumsy and it was freaking Foggy the _fuck out_. Matt was never clumsy.

They kept yelling, both of them now, calling Matt back, their shouts echoing dully along the remains of the bridges' pilings.

"You can do it, Matt! A little further!"

"Come on, buddy, come on, buddy!"

He got to the concrete-- the half-sunken street-- and stopped, shaking his head, coughing. Disoriented. Hypothermia. He was going to freeze to death before he even got back to the shoreline.

"No, no, Matt, don't stop, you need to keep moving!"

"Get up, Matt, get up!"

_"Get your stupid fucking ass up off of that bridge right fucking now, Matty!"_

He shook his head again, pawing at one of his ears. His legs were wobbly and even from the shoreline, Foggy could see him shivering. Christ. Jesus Christ.

"Move, you fucking asshole! _Move!"_

Matt stumbled, sluggish, pulling himself up onto the bridge. He had to roll awkardly after every jump because he wasn't landing on his feet so well anymore. He was panting so hard they could hear it from the shore, rapid whistling breaths chaperoned by coughs.

Almost there. He just had to get over the metal support beams.

"Right there, Matt, that's perfect, you're gonna make it!"

Matt stopped again. He huddled over himself, trembling, clutching that stupid fucking gun to his chest, and wouldn't get back up.

"No, no! Don't you do that! Get back up right now!" Foggy was shrieking. "Don't you fucking dare lie down on me now, you fucking asshole! Matt! Get your ass in gear! Jesus Christ, _get up!"_   His voice was raw, cracked into pieces like the bridge itself. "Up! _Up!_ Move it!"

Matt wouldn't budge.

"Get the fuck up, you _coward!_ Put your fucking hands under you and stand up! Come on!" His whole body hurt. He scrubbed hard at his face, at the tears there. His legs were pacing but he hadn't noticed till now and couldn't feel the pain in them anymore.

His harsh orders turned into shrill pleas. "Matt, _please_ , Matty, you need to try, _please fucking try_ , you have to! Please, you gotta get up!"

Matt shook his head again, rubbing at his ears with both hands now. His back rose and fell with heavy breaths. He tilted his head around, then pushed his hands under him, and grabbed the rifle, and struggled back to his feet.

"Come on, man, just a little more," Foggy cried, while crying; he had to keep swiping roughly at his face to be able to fucking see. "A little more. You can do it. Come on, Matt, come on, I know you can do it. Just a few more jumps."

Chest heaving, Matt finally got to the end of the support beam. Above the shoreline, above where Foggy was pacing and sobbing. He started down it, slipped again, tumbled down to the gravel with a weak grunt.

And he still had that stupid fucking rifle.

Foggy was all over him before he could get up, intending to scrape the river off of him with his hands. Matt fought to his feet but immediately stumbled, slumping; Foggy caught him with his shoulder. He started wiping the shit off of Matt's face, hands quaking in panic.

\---

_Step ten (mandatory): cry more when he gets back to shore and absolutely flip shit because hypothermia and holy mother of God my best friend almost drowned for a goddamned gun and holy Christ on a cracker he's disoriented as fuck because water and the river is_ all over him _._

\---

A hazy memory came back in Foggy's head, painful and disorienting, and he remembered-- he _remembered--_

\---

_Step eleven (mandatory): stick your fingers down Matt's throat so he vomits up the black gritty bullshit that he swallowed while trying not to drown._

\---

He grabbed Matt's jaw, hard, and plunged his fingers into the stupid fucker's throat, twisting out of the way of the resulting retch and gritty black water that came after. Matt pawed at him, confused, either by the fact that he was throwing up or because there had been fingers in his damn mouth or because Foggy had been the one to do it to him.

Foggy didn't care. He kept his friend bent double. "Sick it up, Matt, sick it up," he breathed, twisting one hand into the hair at the back of Matt's head, digging hard with his knuckles under Matt's sternum with the other. "You gotta get it out. You'll die if you don't get it out of you."

Karen came around, hands shaking, but didn't touch either of them.

"Get the extra water from the truck," Foggy ordered to her, wincing as Matt coughed and gagged and heaved weakly for breath, disoriented. He was shuddering and shivering all over, and Foggy yanked off his own jacket and put it on Matt's shoulders.

He hated himself as he tightened his grip in Matt's hair and jammed his fingers down his throat again. Foggy knew that, at any time, Matt could tighten his jaw and bite him. Draw blood. Turn him feral.

Foggy didn't give a fuck. He repeated the action until Matt was just heaving up a foamy, yellowish mess, whimpering and clawing at Foggy's elbow, tears streaming from his eyes.

He never bit.

There was movement next to them. "Here, here." It was Karen, back already; he hadn't even noticed her run off.

Foggy snatched the bottle from her hand and opened it, splashing it across Matt's forehead to try to get the river out of his eyes and nose and mouth.

Matt flinched the second the water touched him, and panicked, swiping violently at it and then its source and then Foggy's chest, probably thinking he'd gone back into the river somehow. Why was he so _fucking disoriented?_

"N'go! Away!" Matt spouted, tossing his head, trying to get the water off himself. He clawed weakly at Foggy's arm. "D'n'wn't!"

"Hey, shh, shh, it's okay, I'm cleaning you off."

Matt whined. High-pitched from the back of his throat. Of all the noises he made, before and after the virus, that one was the worst. He tried to say Foggy's name but word ground itself to nothing in the black grit that was in his throat.

"Don't move, don't move. Close your eyes. I'm putting more on you." Foggy splashed it again, trying to ignore how hard and fast Matt was shaking. He moved his other hand, following behind the water with the sleeve of his sweater. "Don't inhale, don't inhale!" Jesus, his skin was already red from the shit in the water but his lips were turning blue, and they needed to--

"We gotta get him in the truck. We gotta get him to the apartment," Karen said, suddenly alive and standing right next to them, and she was actually bending down to grab Matt's elbow, to get him upright and moving. "Come on. Come on, Matt. Let's go."

"L'm'go," he grumbled, low and weak on the tail-end of a cough.

They stuffed him in the backseat and Foggy climbed in after him. His leg twinged enough to rise over his panic and terror and he blew out a breath at the pain. Matt huddled tight into himself, shivering hard, pushing himself away from Foggy and toward the door. Karen put the keys in the ignition and the engine turned over, the truck jerking underneath them as it leapt forward onto the road. Foggy heard the truck's heater kick on and the smell of stagnant, burning dust swept through the air.

"Okay, okay, we're gonna be okay," Foggy hissed, mostly to himself, crawling over and pushing the hair out of Matt's face because it was retaining water and soaking it back into his skin. "Matty, talk to me, okay?"

No answer.

"Listen to me, you need to actually talk, man, all right?"

"Uhn." Matt scrubbed his hands on his face and tried to shake his head again, but only got the usual twitches of movement. He dragged his fingertips around his ears, whining. "Fog-Foggy? Can't."

Foggy felt about as cold as the river. "You can't hear?" Jesus Christ, _fuck no_. No no no no no no. "Is there water?" He grabbed Matt's jaw again, trying to ignore his startled flinch. "Tilt your head, come on, let it drain out."

Matt's head didn't want to go that way. The twitching got infinitely worse the second Foggy forced it sideways against his shoulder. He grimaced and pushed weakly at Foggy's arm, his whines on the edge of hysterical now, as close to truly blind as he could ever get. "Fog, _no_ , Fog."

"Okay, okay, let's lie down then. Lie on your side."

Karen hit something that snapped under the tires, jostling Matt and Foggy into each other. "Sorry, sorry," she hissed, but she wasn't slowing down. They couldn't slow down.

\---

_Step twelve (optional): apologize for ruining the truck's interior with black river bullshit because Matt's got water in his ears and is incredibly fucked up. Try to get the shit out of his ears while also trying not to bounce all over the place because Karen's driving like a fucking maniac to get them to fresh water before Matt's skin starts sloughing off._

\---

Matt scrabbled at the seat as Foggy pushed him down to his side, trying to get the water to drain from his ears. "Hold still there. Hold still. Let it drain." He could feel the tremor and the violent shivering, two separate frequencies that were nearly vibrating Matt right off the goddamn seat.

"Foggy, _no!"_   Matt whimpered. Blue lips. Hypothermia. Not good. He clawed at Foggy's arm, trying to get him off, but he was clumsy and horrifyingly weak and couldn't get far. "Off!"

"It's okay!" He pushed Matt's head down against the seat and held it there, ignoring his panicked and frail struggle to break away. A dusty alley flashed through his mind. Matt yelped and bucked, all instinct, trying to resist, trying to get Foggy off of himself.

"I'm not gonna hurt you, Matt!"

"Off, off, off, Foggy!" He was digging furrows into the pleather with his blunt fingernails, breaths on the wrong side of hyperventilation and shaking like he'd never done before. He sobbed and wailed and his voice came out afterward in a terrified babble, "Don't, I don't want! Off, off, Fog off Fog, Fog! Foggy! I _don't want!"_

Foggy didn't budge. He kept Matt there until he shuddered and his head twitched hard a few times and his face twisted in shuddering bewilderment. His rapid breathing slowed, just slightly, and Foggy leaned closer. Spoke louder. "You hear me now? Matt?"

His eyes were jerking around. "I hear," he whined, rubbing at his other ear now, but half of his hearing was better than none at all. His breathing didn't slow. "Hear you. Foggy. Help. _Help_." He sucked in a breath. "Off, Foggy, off!"

"It's okay," Foggy said, hauling him back upright. His head tilted unevenly, listing toward the water still trapped in his other ear, face screwed up tightly in discomfort and confusion. "This way, lie back down this way," he ordered, tugging at Matt's shoulders, and Matt tried to resist but his muscles were stiff from the cold and he couldn't get control of them.

Foggy grabbed him and forced him down. Something was shrieking a warning at him in the back of his head. "You have to get it out. I know this sucks. Fucking hold _still_." Jesus Christ, they had to flush it, too. He knew what the water did when it got on skin. And against the delicate membrane of an eardrum? _Matt's_ fucking eardrum? _That he needed to fucking function?_

He scrabbled around and grabbed the rest of the bottle of water Karen had given him. His heart hammered in his chest, telling him that with every beat, every second he took, the water could eat into Matt's ear and he'd be fucked. Permanently.

Foggy swallowed heavily, blinked rapidly. He snapped his fingers next to the ear he was trying to drain. "Tell me when you hear this!"

Matt didn't need to; the second he could, Foggy saw him twitch and flinch away with a startled gasp, clawing back upright.

"Back down. Back down."

"I don't want, I don't want--"

"I _know you don't!_ Fucking hold still, Matt!" He shoved Matt's head down against his thigh. It didn't take much strength to pin him there and even that made him want to throw up. Foggy let out a sharp breath, and it felt like ice against the back of his teeth as he tilted the bottle and poured the clean water into Matt's ear, slapping his palm over the top of it immediately after.

Jesus, if he'd been flipping out _before--_

Matt was an explosion of utter hysteria, bucking and swinging a stiff arm and howling, high and shrill, pure terror.  _"No! No! Off, off! Off, please, off! Don't don't don't Foggy don't!"_

"Stop moving! Stop fucking moving!" Foggy had to keep all his weight on Matt's goddamn head to keep him down. "I'm trying to help you! It's going to--"

Karen hit something else, hard, because she'd been gaping at them in the rear-view, genuine horror and worry on her face. Foggy might have been happy to see it, if her shit driving hadn't thrown them all around, allowing Matt the space to pry himself out from under Foggy's hold and scramble to the opposite side of the cab.

Heaving for breath, Foggy lurched half-upright-- his leg sang a caterwaul of pain, bright and loud in the back of his head-- and in desperation, grabbed a handful of Matt's dripping hoodie and threw him back down to the seat, slamming one hand down on his temple and the other on his neck and a knee tangled between his legs, Foggy pinning him there with all the weight he had.

He was shouting right in Matt's ear and he knew he shouldn't have, he knew that, but it was already happening and it just kept fucking happening and he felt like a bystander to his own fucking panic.

"Stop! Don't fight! _Stop!"_

Foggy was expecting the struggle of his life. He was expecting punches, scratches, and preferred injury to having Matt lose one of his remaining senses to the water when he'd already lost most of one to the virus. He was expecting to get snapped at. To get bitten.

Instead, Matt froze, pale and panting and quaking, gave one last moaning whimper, and _totally fucking folded_. He submitted, silent and shuddering, gasping weakly for breath. He went slack into the seat, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to curl up.

\---

_Step thirteen: fuck up absolutely everything._

\---

Matt was heaving underneath him with inaudible sobs. "Sorry. Sorry, I sorry, I sorry."

It was a million times worse than getting bitten. Foggy felt his stomach lurch. This was not something he expected to see today. This was not something he'd expected to see at any point, ever, in his life.

He still grabbed the water bottle. He still poured it into Matt's ear, flushing the black water out, the grit, the oily substance that would have taken his friend's hearing, his strongest tether to the world around him. He still flipped Matt over, and did the same thing with the other ear, while Matt sobbed silently and tried his best not to move.

Foggy had never, in his entire fucking life, seen such fear on his friend's face.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, a weak and painfully articulate echo of his friend, as he wiped some of the grit away with the corner of his sweater sleeve. "I am so fucking sorry, Matty, I'm so fucking sorry."

The truck shuddered underneath them, loud and sudden. He heard Karen shift it into park. She didn't even turn it off before climbing out, opening the garage, then turning back and tugging open the door to the back cab. Her skin was as pale as Matt's.

"Come on," she breathed.

Foggy picked himself up off of Matt, and Matt scrabbled, trying to get away from him, trying both to curl himself up into a safer position and get out of the truck at the same time.

Yeah, fuck the splash and the yelp in the river, _this_ was the fucking image that was never going to leave his head.

Karen reached out stiffly to help Matt out of the truck, and he found himself caught between a rock and a hard place, two people he was suddenly terrified of. Foggy wanted to stab himself, but he moved forward, slowly, speaking quietly.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Matty. Come on. Let me help you."

And Matt flinched, head bowing, and listed toward him, obedient and submissive. It hurt more than his leg and it hurt more than seeing the sky being ripped in half. He reached out, and brushed his fingers along Matt's elbow, as gently as he possibly could, and Matt still jerked like he'd been slapped.

"Come on, Matty. I won't hurt you," he breathed, guiding his friend out of the car.

Karen was already inside the garage. She had a bucket sloshing with water. Clear and clean and carrying the faint scent of bleach. "Help me hang this up," she breathed, face twisting in pain.

Foggy tugged Matt inside the garage, left him standing, shivering and swaying, and went to help Karen. "Don't move, okay, buddy?" He didn't get an answer, but broke away and went to grab the handle of the bucket. Heavy. _Eight pounds per gallon_ , Matt had always said.

Grunting, he hung it on a hook that was dangling from the ceiling in the corner of the garage. Karen drew her knife, waggled it in Matt's direction. "Bring him here."

When Foggy turned to approach, Matt flinched hard and took a step back. Foggy froze.

"Matt. Matty. Don't run. Okay? Don't run. I'm not going to hurt you. You need to get that shit off of your skin. It will _kill you_ , Matty, do you understand this?"

Matt kept his head lowered, and didn't speak.

Foggy started moving again, slow and careful, but they were running out of time. He stepped forward carefully, and hooked his fingers around Matt's wrist. He jerked hard, and Foggy didn't know if it was because of his hearing going all wonky or because right now Foggy was scaring the shit out of him. Again.

He was the worst fucking friend in the world.

\---

_Step fourteen (mandatory): use every ounce of water you can find to wash the river off of Matt's skin before it poisons him to death._

\---

His hands were on Matt's shoulders, trying to ignore how his shivering got infinitely worse as soon as he'd made contact. "All right, shh-shh-shh. Come on."

"You gotta..." Karen gestured vaguely, with an odd look on her face, "...clothes."

"I know that. He's a little freaked out right now." Understatement. Matt was gazing at the floor, quaking from a mixture of fear and cold and his virus. "Okay, buddy, you gotta get your nasty clothes off, okay? Can you do that?"

He hurried to comply-- as much as he could hurry with his body only half-working. It only half-worked in the first place. Foggy came around to help, wincing at the smell of the water and the way it clung to everything and the painful irritation it had spread to every inch of skin it touched. "It's okay, Matty," he repeated, soft and steady like a mantra.

Matt was still fucking skeletal. It was easy to overlook when he was layered in clothing.

Foggy nudged him toward the bucket. Karen's face was-- Jesus, her face was _red_. Ms. Doesn't-Have-External-Feelings. If not for the situation, he'd be laughing his fucking ass off. Maybe later, if Matt didn't die, or permanently flee in terror, or go deaf.

\---

_Step fifteen (optional): try to ignore Karen's faint blush at having to see Matt naked._

\---

"Jesus Christ, Karen, it's a penis, you've seen a hundred of them."

"Not _his!"_

"What are you, fucking fourteen? Help me!"

She kept her eyes averted and moved back over to the bucket, taking her knife and jabbing it repeatedly into the underside. Matt flinched at the noise. It meant he could hear, at least, and Foggy tried to take solace in that. Water started dripping out where she'd punctured the bucket, slow but steady-- a makeshift shower.

"Okay, I know you don't want more water, Matty, but you gotta, okay?"

Foggy put him under the stream and he started panting again, terrified, but he still didn't try to bolt again, because his fear of _Foggy_ outweighed it. And Jesus, nothing else in Foggy's life had ever hurt so motherfucking badly.

Karen went and filled a second bucket, and Foggy ended up dumping it all at once on Matt's head to speed the process. Matt didn't fight it, but he did dig his nails into his skin, trying weakly to get the river off of himself. He'd stopped shivering, and Foggy knew it was a bad sign.

\---

_Step sixteen (mandatory): dump more frigid water on the motherfucker, even though his lips are blue (but at least they aren't black)._

\---

Then Karen said something about his plan and how she'd thought it involved flying. For a while, Foggy wondered if sailing to the ship on some kind of ridiculous feral-powered kite would have ended as badly as the original plan did.

Foggy went as fast as he could, getting the black grit off of Matt's skin. Matt was starting to sway, and his skin was like paper.

"Okay, good enough for now, you need to get warm," Foggy said, grabbing Matt's wrist and pulling him out from under the water stream. Matt didn't startle that time, moving slow and sluggish, like he was half-drugged. White skin, blue lips, blue _fingernails_ , and Foggy was an idiot, and Matt was going to die of hypothermia. His legs buckled and Foggy had to lurch forward and catch him. Pain jumped like lightning along his leg and he bit his yelp of pain into his tongue instead of vocalizing it.

\---

_Step seventeen (optional): nearly kill Matt via hypothermia._

\---

Karen was there, a towel in one hand, reaching out to snatch Matt's elbow with the other before Foggy lost his grip and the poor bastard went face-first into the concrete. "Jesus, he's like ice."

"No shit," Foggy growled, feeling warmth running down his leg and feeling guilty that there was any part of him that was warmer than Matt was right now. He snatched the towel from Karen's hand. "Blankets, okay? Now." Instead of watching her move off, he went back to his friend, rubbing the towel over his body.

Matt's throat worked like he was trying to talk, but no noises came out, and he started clawing weakly at Foggy's arm.

"No, no, buddy, let me help." Confusion. Because he was hypothermic. Foggy had gotten the water out of his friend's ears and the river off of his skin and now he'd killed him by freezing him to death. "Shh, shh," Foggy breathed, moving faster, rubbing along Matt's arms, ignoring the steel-grey rivulets of black water that were still dripping out of his hair and running down his body.

Karen came back down from upstairs with a box full of blankets in her arms, wincing heavily. "Get him warmed up before he collapses," she told him, breathless.

Foggy grabbed every single blanket out of the box and wrapped them around Matt, then guided him to the stairs to sit, ignoring how his legs wouldn't work and he was just staggering around like he'd drank two eels. "Get the fleece one, off of the futon. It'll warm him up faster." Foggy sat on the stair behind him, tugging him against his chest, trying to share warmth.

She was up and back in fifteen seconds.

Matt still wasn't responding to Foggy talking, or to either of them, really, only gazing with fixed eyes out at nothing, stiff all over.

"Hold on a minute," Karen breathed, moving past them as Foggy got the fleece against Matt's white skin. He started rubbing him between the blankets, his chest, his arms, his neck, a cycle that he passed rapidly through, over and over.

"Come on, Matt, come on back, come on back, I'm warming you up, you're gonna be okay," he found himself saying, a weak whisper into the back of Matt's head. No responses yet. "Come on, buddy, come on..."

He heard plastic crinkling in the truck outside, and realized sluggishly that Karen had opened the garage door and gone out there without him even taking notice. Jesus, he sucked at paying attention.

Fuck it. He was useless at just about everything right now. At being a doctor, at being a friend. At warming Matt up, because Matt still wasn't coming back, his body halting its shivering in a desperate play at not fucking dying. Which meant Matt was _fucking dying_ because Foggy wasn't doing well enough.

Karen came back with a green Ziploc bag in either hand, snatching a handful of rags from the toolbox and and wrapping the stained fabric around them. She let out a heavy breath and came over. "Here, this'll help."

Foggy blinked slowly. He felt like _he_ was the one with the brain damage, right now. "What are they?"

"The chemical heaters that come in the MREs. They're meant for food."

"They come with heaters?" he asked, stupidly, reaching out to take one and nearly jumping out of his skin when he felt warmth. Actual warmth, from an inanimate object, not from a body. "Fuck, it's hot."

"Yeah. Don't burn him."

Foggy wrapped the one he had in another blanket. He knew he couldn't warm Matt up too quickly. The first heater he stuffed between Matt's legs and the other he pushed up against Matt's chest, and then he went back to the rubbing, still mumbling in Matt's ear, still trying to coax him back. He would never stop trying, even when there would no longer be anywhere to coax Matt back from.

"His hair," Karen said, after a minute.

"Yeah, it's soaked."

She moved away, came back again with a pair of scissors in her hands. "Let me cut it off."

The fact that she was voluntarily offering to touch a feral said a lot about the situation, Foggy thought. Karen went to work, hacking away at the clumped, tangled chunks of hair that had turned into the least helpful sponges that would ever exist. Good God, did she suck at it.

\---

_Step eighteen (mandatory): help Karen give Matt the worst haircut he has ever received in his life._

\---

"It's gonna look like crap," Foggy grunted, rubbing Matt's back with one hand and trying to keep Matt's fucking head still with the other. Impossible. The twitch was still there and it just got worse the harder he tried to hold on. But Matt was clinging to the blankets with his good hand now, which was a response, something that meant he wasn't fucking dead; the other hand was spazzing all over the place and fucking worthless. He still wasn't talking. He still wasn't shivering. The tremor didn't count. "Jesus."

"It doesn't matter," Karen snapped, shaking her head. "He'll grow it back."

"...Sorry, Matty."

Right around the time she was getting to the last bits around the back of Matt's head, he started shivering again. Foggy blasted an unfairly-warm sigh of relief into Matt's neck, squeezing his eyes shut to get the stupid fucking tears out of them.

"Perfect, Matty, perfect. Come on back to us."

Karen had chopped off most of Matt's hair. It stuck up unevenly, ridges of differing lengths, but she had the soaked, matted parts all piled up on the floor next to her instead of it leaking more of the river into Matt's skin. "Yeah, uh, it looks awful," she eventually agreed, gathering up the mess to toss it into one of the buckets.

A bad haircut was pretty low on the list of awful fucking bullshit he'd done to Matt today.

She came back around with another rag, damp with clean water, and started scrubbing it out of Matt's remaining hair.

Foggy was staring at her, he knew he was. When she caught his gaze, her eyebrows furrowed and she frowned, hard.

"What?" she asked, not stopping.

"You're..." Foggy let out a breath. "Thank you. Thank you, Karen."

"Shut up." The rag in her hand was already a dark grey. "You said it yourself. I should have stopped him."

"Why didn't you?"

"...I don't know." She blinked, hard, like Foggy had just done to get the tears out of his eyes. "I'm a greedy bitch, I guess." Karen straightened up, apparently satisfied with her cleaning job, tossing the rag in the bucket with the hair. "He needs to drink something."

"Lukewarm," Foggy said to her, and she was gone.

Matt's shivering was coming back like an earthquake. His teeth started chattering and he clenched his jaw in an attempt to stop it. Inside the blankets, his hands had found the MRE heater, and he was clutching it to himself. Foggy could hear the plastic crinkling.

"I need you to talk to me, Matty," Foggy spoke quietly in his ear.

"Hngrh."

"Can you talk to me, Matt?"

"Mn."

"Can you use words?"

Matt's eternal frown ticked just a few degrees lower. Finally, he talked. Slow and unsteady and nothing like the _Walk by yourself, I am listening_ that he'd managed with such brilliant pride yesterday. "Fog-gy. _Cold_."

A smile tried to sneak its way across Foggy's face. "I know. I'm warming you up."

"Cold," Matt repeated, because he probably couldn't find much else right now.

Karen came back from upstairs with a mug in her hands. "Give me one of the heaters."

Foggy didn't dare take away the one Matt was holding, so he handed her the other one. "Careful, it might have touched his dick."

She rolled her eyes.

But Matt was moving more and more. He pushed back against Foggy's chest, not in an attempt to shove himself away, but an attempt to get more contact. The shivering was violent and the tremor made it worse, but it was a good sign. Foggy tugged him closer.

"I'm sorry, Matty," he said.

It took a long time for him to dig a response out of his head, even though it was only a repeat of the last one. "Cold. Foggy." He was trying to hunker tighter into himself. His less-useful hand came out and he tried to clutch onto the blanket with it, but he couldn't get his muscles to grip. Matt spoke again, and his voice was frail like the body it was trapped in.

"...I am. I am. Not. Good. Sorry."

"What?"

"F-Fog. Gy. Foggy, not... not good, sorry."

"Why do you keep saying that? You're good. You've always been good." Foggy kept him close, talked quietly into his ear. "Why do you think you aren't good, Matty?"

"...Did, mm, not good. Sorry. Foggy. Sorry. You. Not, mm. Not okay, me."

Foggy couldn't figure that one out. So much for all their speech progress. Matt was nearly incomprehensible again. He came from a different angle. "You got enough MREs to feed us for weeks, buddy. How is that not good?"

"Mm." Matt managed to duck his head and bury his face in the fleece blanket. "Had, um. No m..." he huffed, weak and slow. "M-more. No more. Make me no more go away."

_Make me no more go away_. "When I held you down?"

Matt hid his face.

"You think I was punishing you when I held you down? Punishing you for going to the boat?"

He didn't budge. The weak, shuddering curve of his spine gave Foggy his answer.

"No, Matt, no. I wasn't... I didn't do that to punish you. I was scared, buddy. I was really scared. People do stupid things when they're scared. I thought you were going to damage your ears. They're very important."

Matt just huddled up tighter. Foggy kept him close, trying to warm him up faster. He rubbed his hand up and down Matt's shoulder, his arm, creating friction that Matt was still leaning into and wanting more of. It was the saddest thing Foggy had ever fucking seen.

\---

_Step nineteen (mandatory): save Matt from hypothermia. Fail to save Matt from his absolute phobia of being pinned down and from being terrified to a silent wreck because of it._

\---

"I..." Matt talked again, stopped again, clenched his jaw to prevent the chattering. "...Mm. Sorry. Sorry, Foggy. Sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"B..." his voice was muffled by the blanket, "...b... boat. I went. Sh... should... should no-not. I... not good. Listening."

Foggy was chewing on the inside of his cheek. He didn't like that Matt was sounding like he'd gone twelve steps back as far as his speech went. He'd gotten so _far_. "I wasn't punishing you for doing that, Matty. That's not why I did that to you. I was scared."

"...Scared," Matt echoed. "Foggy. Scared _me_."

Somehow, Matt was admonishing him. Telling Foggy off for what he'd done. Even with his frail and broken voice, it sounded like a furious shout in Foggy's ears. _You scared the shit out of me, asshole, and you're the last person that's supposed to do that to me!_

He wished Matt _would_ shout, because it'd at least be something he deserved.

"I know I did. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it."

His shiver came back harder, for a half of a second, like he was remembering it, playing it back in his head. He probably was. He probably would for a long, long time. A horrible memory, that _Foggy_ had given him.

Worst friend.  World.  Et cetera.

"Not. Foggy, not, mm. Not more."

"I won't do it again, Matty, I'll never do it again."

"Not ag-g-gain," Matt repeated.

"Yeah." He tugged Matt tighter. He didn't resist and Foggy didn't know if it was because of frightened complacency or not, and he tried to swallow the anger at himself that was churning up his throat. "...I'm sorry, buddy." He'd never be able to say it enough.

"Mm."

"But, hey, I got the shit out of your ears, yeah?"

Matt grumbled. "Itchy." It sounded a little bit more like himself.

"Yeah, no shit. Does your skin hurt?"

"Itchy. Mm. Not a l-lot, hurts."

Foggy reached up and carded his fingers through Matt's awful, awful haircut. "How about here?"

"Itchy."

"Does it burn?"

"B-burn, what is this?"

Foggy twisted his mouth around, thinking. "It's... more than itchy. Itchy and hurting."

Matt huffed slowly through his nose. "Does not bur-burn. Itchy."

"That's good."

Something caught his eye to the left. Karen came back with the mug in her hands. There was steam coming out of it. "Here. I, uh..."

Foggy felt his nose crinkle with the influx of an unfamiliar-- but familiar-- smell. "Is... did you make him... cider?"

"W-well, it was in the MRE, and I thought... uh... calories," she explained, weakly. "Is that... is that not okay?"

"No. No, it's fine." He was just trying to get over the fact that Karen had gone over and voluntarily made goddamn hot cider for a hypothermic feral. "That's great. You smell that, Matty?"

"Yes."

\---

_Step twenty: remember what apples smell like._

\---

Foggy took the mug with both hands, brought it around and held it in front of Matt's face, the insides of his elbows leaning gently against his friend's biceps, his chin resting lightly on a shivering shoulder. "What do you think?"

"...I want," he said, very clearly, because he really fucking wanted it. He shifted around inside the blankets, probably hugging the heater between his knees, so he could bring out his good hand and try to get to it.

"Let me help."

Karen moved back and leaned against the wall of the garage, arms crossed, looking like she was trying not to watch but also like she was trying to memorize every goddamn second.

Matt sucked it down in all of thirty seconds, making a low undulating noise that Foggy could only identify as pleasure. He licked his lips for ages afterwards, as if to get every last hint of the taste onto his tongue. "...Good," he declared, eventually.

"Yeah, I bet. _You're_ the one who got it for us."

"Emaries?"

"Uh-huh." Foggy took the mug from Matt's hand and set in on the stair next to them. He was still shivering, but not violently, just a weak aftershock that was about as strong as the tremor on a normal day.

"...More?"

"In a little while. Let's get upstairs first, yeah? Get some clothes on you. Fucking exhibitionist."

"Exhibi..." Matt grunted at himself for being unable to complete the word. To his credit, it was a long and complicated word. "What is this?"

"It means you like running around naked."

"Hn. Don't want it. Cold."

"No shit. Come on." Foggy stood up, gritting his teeth around the yelp of pain that tried to break itself out of his throat. Oh, he'd fucked up his stitches, definitely. Didn't matter right now. He pushed a thumb along Matt's upper arm, then circled his fingers gently around his elbow. "Can you stand, bud?"

"Yes," Matt grumbled, and then tried. Failed. He made a low growl of irritation.

"It's cool, man. Just--"

To the surprise of both of them, Karen pushed herself off of the wall and came over, offering out her hand. Matt hesitated, nibbling on his lip, then reached out to her, molasses-slow, with his right hand. She took it and tugged him to his feet, her facial muscles stiff as she hid what was probably a heavy grimace of pain.

"You shouldn't be doing that," Foggy said to her, getting Matt turned around and oriented in the direction of the stairs. "Your back."

"You shouldn't, either," she retorted, and pointed at his leg.

He scoffed, ignoring that, and led Matt carefully up the stairs. It took a while, and Matt grumbled a lot, not happy with how uncooperative his legs had become. When they got to the futon, he flopped himself all over the top of it, yanking all the blankets close around himself and tucking all his limbs inside.

Karen stayed behind to put the truck in the garage and then followed behind them, a pile of MREs in her arms. She dumped them on the kitchen counter and slipped into the bedroom, coming back out with another box.

"Uh. These were Eric's, and I don't know if they'll fit, but..."

"Oh, awesome." Foggy took it from her and carried it over to the coffee table. Eric had been quite a bit larger than Matt, more muscular, more broad. Bigger than Foggy, even. Of course, that hadn't gotten Eric too far, because Matt had still snapped the fucker's neck. "Get up, buddy, come pick some clothes out for you to wear."

"Yes," Matt mumbled from underneath the blankets, pushing himself upright. Jesus, his hair. He reached out for the box and Foggy nudged it closer, letting him feel around.

Karen went back into the garage, gathering more of the MREs, Foggy's medical bag, their guns-- and the assault rifle and bullets that Matt had nearly died for. Foggy didn't even remember anyone grabbing them. She dropped them on the counter like they'd burned her.

Foggy sat down next to Matt, stretching out his leg, unable to conceal his hiss this time.

"Bleeding," Matt said, tilting his head. His hands stilled on the clothes. "Foggy, bleeding."

"Yeah, I ripped my stitches." Foggy groaned at the look on his friend's face. "Hey, no. Don't worry about me. Find a goddamn set of clothes, man."

Matt jolted and hurried to do it, bowing his head again. God fucking dammit.

"Matt, I'm not--" Foggy sighed, hard, and rubbed his face. "I'm not mad at you, man. I'm not going to hurt you. I just need you to get some clothes on."

He was silent as he went back to the box, settling on another hoodie-- big shocker. An olive-green color, almost the same shade as the sky. And, hey, actual pants. Fabric that might actually cover the entire length of his legs. "This," he mumbled, pulling them into his lap, head still bowed.

Foggy went back to the box, digging out a pair of boxers. "You're not going commando anymore, man." He put them in Matt's hands with the others. "Put these on, too. Under the pants. You understand this?"

"...Yes."

"Okay, get changed. Bathroom."

Matt hummed, then got up, dragging the blankets with him as he slunk off.

Karen stared at Foggy from across the room. There were words on her face, rolling around in her mouth, but she didn't say any of them. He didn't stop to wonder what they were, and instead snapped his fingers, waving her over.

"Come on. You need to replace some of my stitches for me."

She nodded, and came around with his medical bag. "Pants off," she said, and he made a noise, involuntary, on the back of his tongue.

"Just can't wait to see me in my underoos, huh?"

"Don't flatter yourself."

Foggy laughed again. It was weak, but it was definitely a laugh. The wound was in such an awkward place, and he ended up face-down on the futon while she knelt on the floor next to it. This time, he instructed her, guiding her through cleaning away the blood that had come out, cutting away the fucked stitches.

\---

_Step twenty-one (optional): talk Karen through putting your leg back together because you're an idiot._

\---

Matt came wandering out of the bathroom, and Foggy rolled his head on the mattress to get a look. The hoodie was hanging off of him, and the pants were a bit too long, but-- damn. Seeing him standing there in the half-light of the kitchen, hair chopped back down, clutching the blankets in a bundle against his stomach-- he looked like Matt again. The old one. It made Foggy's breath catch up in his throat, behind his tongue.

Then Matt tilted his head sharply, mumbled a, "Foggy, okay?", and the illusion shattered.

Damn. "...Yeah, I'll be okay."

He came over, quiet and worried, putting the blankets down on the futon. Karen kept working, steady and determined. Matt took a few steps back and settled himself on the coffee table, leaning on his arms, ignoring the way the pressure against his left hand made his whole left side shake just a little harder.

\---

_Step twenty-two (mandatory): watch Matt sit alone and cold because you're an idiot._

\---

Nobody talked as Karen finished the job, then wrapped fresh gauze around Foggy's leg, taping it down, her hands gentler than he thought they could ever be. She gathered up the tools in the same way he did whenever he was done with something, putting things back in the bag and carrying the rest into the kitchen. To be cleaned, Foggy assumed. He'd do it later.

\---

_Step twenty-three (mandatory): enjoy the awful silence because you're an idiot._

\---

Then she came back, and sat down on her couch, and still, nobody said anything.

And since it had always been Foggy's job to dispel awkward silences, even when he usually just made them more awkward, he opened his mouth.

\---

_Step twenty-four (mandatory): break the awful silence because fuck the awful silence._

\---

"It smells like shit in here."

Matt huffed, a weak laugh, but didn't move back to the futon. Instead, he got back to his feet, and drifted into the kitchen. Foggy watched as he went to the island where Karen had put everything, tapping his fingertips around until he located the assault rifle. Matt took it into his hands, and brought it back into the living room.

He stopped in front of Karen and held it out to her.

There was agony on her face as she reached out and took it from him. "Thank you, Matt."

"...You're welcome." _Yore wall-come_. Closer. He turned back, and moved to the futon, hesitating for only a few seconds before sitting down next to Foggy.

And Foggy hesitated for only a few minutes before reaching out and burying his fingers gently into the remaining hair at the nape of Matt's neck, pulling him close and nudging their foreheads together. Matt accepted it, and Foggy felt him relax, all the tightly-wound nervousness draining slowly out of him.

"Thanks, buddy."

A moment of stillness passed, and then Matt smiled.

\---

_Step twenty-five (optional): worry about Matt._

_Step twenty-six (mandatory): worry about Matt a_ lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _You heard my voice. I came out of the woods by choice._  
>  _Shelter also gave their shade..._  
>  _But in the dark, I have no name._  
>  Mumford & Sons


	17. tragedy + time (part one)

_Look closer_ , Foggy had told her.

Karen sat on her couch with the assault rifle in her lap, dripping black sludge onto her pants, and stared across the room at the two of them. An apology on both their faces that neither of them really saw, both of them shivering for different reasons. Matt smiling, quiet and soft, leaning desperately into the contact of their shattered little hug; Foggy gripping him tightly like he required the other man's touch just to breathe, his voice so quiet she could barely hear it, drifting weak through the stale air of the apartment.

"You're awesome, Matty. Don't know what we'd do without you here."

It was not the first time that she'd witnessed it, but this time she felt like she was actually seeing it for what it was. Broken and small but strong and steady, just like the two men that were each a part of it, bound by it.

_Look closer._

She was. She was.

\---

"They look good. None of 'em got ripped out, at least."

"I told you so," Karen sighed, leaning her arms on the couch's backrest as Foggy leaned in behind her, his fingers gentle as he checked on her stitches. Her back was sore as hell, but she knew that was going to happen, carrying shit up and down the stairs, picking Matt up. He'd weighed so little that it hadn't disrupted her stitches at all.

In their room, in the shelter, Foggy had said, _That's okay, Matty, she's probably not hungry. You eat it_. A shaking hand offering her a piece of food. Her own recoil played back through her head and she grit her teeth to try to force it out. It didn't budge.

The hands on her shoulders stilled, then fell away. Foggy spoke softly as he leaned back. "I'll take them out in a few days, I think."

"Okay." She straightened up as he tugged her shirt back down, rubbing her face. _Karen, sorry_ , Matt had mumbled. Carefully, she turned herself round, and sat, keeping her back off of the cushions, keeping her eyes on the ground instead of anywhere else.

Foggy was up and moving back to the futon, carrying himself with care. He eased himself down, careful not to jostle the bundle of blankets that was already there. The apartment still smelled like death, but at least it didn't smell like a dead body.

"How's he doing?" Karen asked. Her eyes raised of their own accord and centered on him.

He'd said, _Please don't start acting like you give a shit about him, Paige_.

Foggy lifted one of the blankets to get a look and she saw the tiny smile that flashed across his face before he put the blanket back down. His voice dropped low and stayed there. "He's fine. Fell asleep."

He'd said, _Chronic fatigue. Or some other fancy-sounding term I haven't read yet._

He'd written, _Slept for ten hours. No memory of previous day. Slept for twelve hours. No memory of previous day. Slept for nine hours. No memory of previous day_. The slanted, messy handwriting swept back through her mind like a twisted and endless highway.

Karen rubbed her face again, and finally said something. "Good job, by the way," she kept her voice down and tried not to speak too clearly, trying not to let off how concerned she actually was. And how baffled she was at herself for feeling concern, knowing the feeling, and letting it flow through her like water instead of trying to plug it up and stuff it down where it couldn't be felt. All of it was like stretching a muscle she didn't realize she still had in her body. "You really know your fucking shit, Foggy."

He smiled again, getting back to his feet and moving unsteadily toward the kitchen. "Lots of practice, Karen."

"With medicine, or with Matt?"

He paused, and then decided, "Both," before poking around the kitchen island and grabbing the MRE pack that she'd already opened for the heater. He came back and sat down on the futon again, dumping the contents of the package out on the coffee table. "I don't know what half this shit is."

"They should all be marked. There's usually some kind of bread or cookie or something. An entree."

Foggy pushed the packages around, flipping them over, reading them. One of them he isolated and then picked up. A grin came across his face. "Fuck yeah, peanut butter."

"You like that shit?"

He was already opening it and sucking on it like a fucking Go-Gurt. "Uh, yeah, who doesn't?"

"The stuff from the MRE is shitty."

"Peanut butter. Don't care." He pulled his uninjured leg up onto the futon with himself, jaw working as he moved the peanut butter around in his mouth. "So, uh," he mumbled, half-around his tongue, "thanks. Again." He jerked his head back toward Matt, unnecessarily. "For helping him."

He'd said, _I fucking took care of him while that goddamn disease tore his head apart!_

Karen stared down at the floor where she'd placed the rifle, then leaned down gingerly and tugged it back into her lap. Something else to focus on, so she wouldn't have to look Foggy in the eye when she spoke.

She tried to be as neutral as possible. "Well, he's sort of important, isn't he?"

"To me? Immensely." He started rolling the foil up from the bottom, like a tube of toothpaste, attempting to extract every last bit of peanut butter out of it. "To you, though?"

She frowned, and tilted the gun around in her lap, staring at the filmy chunks of the river that were still trapped in the grooves. It was going to take a long time to clean. "...I don't know."

"Of course you know," Foggy said, pushing more peanut butter into his mouth and speaking carefully around it. "It's not that complicated. You're either okay with him or you aren't. He's worth something to you or he isn't."

He'd said, _I didn't have a choice, Karen_.

"I'm okay with him," she said, immediately, tapping a thumbnail against the rifle's handguard. "Just... I need time, okay? It's... I'm not used to living with a f-- with him." Karen studied the carrying handle very closely, wondering if the rifle had ever even been used before. Guns were a far more comfortable category for her brain to settle into. "And he's... worth... something," she mumbled, hoping Foggy wouldn't catch it, but he was Foggy, so of course he fucking did.

"More than a gun, though?" He pointed at the rifle, then the MRE spread out on the table. "More than food? I need to know if you see him as more than a goddamn vending machine, Karen. I know we've had this conversation already, but you gotta choose. It's gotta be all one way or all the other, okay?"

He'd said, _The last thing he needs is more confusion when you're involved_.

She sighed, and couldn't come up with anything to say, instead clicking the rifle's safety on and off. It had to be cleared out anyway, she was just getting a head start by fidgeting.

He'd said, _I was thinking about something last night. About how much you two have in common with each other._

Foggy finished the peanut butter and sighed. "Karen, he doesn't..." he dropped his voice even lower than it already was, nothing more than a soft hiss drifting into the dust-speckled air. "He doesn't understand things, you know? He doesn't know that he feels lonely, or isolated, or sad. All he knows is he hurts."

She opened her mouth although she had nothing in her head to say, but Foggy talked again, saving her from whatever embarrassing thing she was going to try to force out.

"I wasn't joking around when I said you reminded me of him," were his whispered words, and now he was the one looking down, staring at his feet, hands in front of himself, idly locking his fingers around the peanut butter wrapper and then unlocking them. "You're picking yourself back up again, Karen, and... and that's huge. That's so important. But Matt, he can't just... open a door and... find everything he's lost sitting there behind it. He has to learn it all over again. And whether or not he truly remembers you, it's still..." he sighed, and his voice was barely audible, "...he's alone, Karen. He's alone in that body of his and he needs help. He needs us. Please tell me you understand that."

He'd said, _That shit fucked him up, did something to his brain, but he's still Matt, all right?_

Karen's eyes were drifting, from Foggy's bowed head, to his hands clasped around the wrapper, to the pile of blankets sitting behind him. "...I understand it," she breathed. Her voice left her like ice, painful and freezing cold. "It hurts, Foggy."

"What hurts?"

She stared at the window. There was a cloud scuttling by, past the shadow of the city's skyline. "All of it. All of that." She gestured weakly toward the futon, toward Matt. Her eyes started to sting and she wiped at them slowly, clenching her gut as she prepared for another pile of sobs to start bursting out of her, but they didn't. She fought them down and was proud at her own strength. "Being alone. Being..." she gestured at herself, uselessly, because Foggy was not looking. "...I think I know... I think I know how he feels."

He'd said, _You haven't got the disease. The rest of you doesn't have a fucking excuse._

It was unpleasant, the hollowness, the roiling lack of emotion always stirring in her head. It was unpleasant and _omniscient_ , overtaking everything, and she had just started to learn how to beat it back, keep it away.

"It sucks," she said after another second.

He blasted out a sharp breath, then a laugh purged of humor. "Yeah, I bet it does." Then he lifted his head and caught her gaze, steely-blue in the weak afternoon light. "But we're here for you. You know I am and... I hope you know Matt is, too. He _wants_ to be there. Whether he remembers you or not. He wants to be there." He sighed, frowned slightly. "...Can you do the same for us, Karen?"

He'd said, _You know that you don't have to be alone, right?_

She looked away from him and out the window, uncomfortable with the truth in his eyes, and took a long time to respond. To come up with the correct words.

He'd said, _You kinda remind me of someone when you do that, you know?_

Almost as an afterthought, he mumbled a soft, "Please?"

Karen frowned, eyes tracing the edge of a half-crumpled building across the street. She focused on the windowsill, then the floor, shifting the gun in her lap. "...Yeah. Yeah, Foggy. I want..." her frown shifted upward, but didn't fade, "...I want to be here." Her eyes darted to his face against her will, and she realized she was eager to see the look on his face, eager to find out if there was happiness there that _she_ had caused.

Foggy just smiled, gentle and honest. "Awesome," he said, a bit louder, clapping his palms on his knees. Matt grumbled behind him and rolled over, and Foggy's smile just ratcheted up into a wide grin. "Welcome back to the firm, Miss Page," he said in a softer tone, and she knew he meant _Page_ and not _Paige_.

A strange, pleasant-feeling noise bubbled out of her and it took her far too long to realize it was a laugh. Foggy echoed her, and she laughed again. Half-strangled and high and weak, but she knew what it was, and she knew it felt nice, and she knew it was something she'd _earned_ , so she just wanted _more_.

He let out a long breath, the smile on his face never moving, and reached back to tighten his hairtie before leaning down toward the table. "I've been staring at this package of lasagna for the last ten minutes, I think I'm gonna die if I can't eat it."

Karen felt herself laugh again, softer and weaker. A chuckle. It sounded a little bit like Matt's, airy and strange and broken. But it was definitely a laugh. "The beef stroganoff is my favorite."

"Oh, God, they have stroganoff?" he asked as he tore open the lasagna, scooping it straight out of the package cold with the plastic spoon that had spilled out with the rest of the food. "Bet you ten bucks he's gonna be awake in... twenty seconds," he said, gesturing with his elbow to the pile of blankets behind him. He took a small bite, and Karen swore she saw his eyes roll up in his head. She wondered what they'd eaten, the two of them, before Matt's brain had burned itself to death and thrown their lives into total fucking chaos.

True to Foggy's prediction, it took exactly twenty seconds for Matt to stir, roll over, and sit up, grumbling and tangled up in all the blankets. His hair was a goddamned mess-- she'd done a pretty shitty hack job on it. There were patches of reddened skin all over him, dry and flaky and probably itchy as fucking hell. Karen felt the guilt roil in her gut and tried to fight it down.

"Told you," Foggy said, still smiling.

Matt tilted his head around, scratching at his face, his jaw, his neck, and yawned, pitching himself forward and leaning his chest on Foggy's back. "I want," he groused into Foggy's neck, sounding like he was still half-asleep.

"Hungry, huh?"

"Mnnngh. Hungry," he repeated, rubbing his nose into Foggy's shoulder.

"Don't wipe your fucking snot on me, Matt."

He blinked twice, rapidly, as if just remembering something, and straightened up. His head tilted and bowed and he frowned. "Mm. Sorry." One of his hands, the good one, found one of the strings on his hoodie and nudged it from side-to-side.

The smile dropped right off of Foggy's face, then twisted and came back as a frown. He half-turned toward Matt and talked quietly. "Hey. I'm not mad, all right? You don't have to be scared, buddy."

Matt was chewing on his lip, tilting his face away. His other hand joined the first, shuddering clumsily.

Foggy let out a breath and put the food down carefully, turning around all the way. He jerked to a stop when Matt recoiled-- actually recoiled, with stuttering movements, like he was expecting a fucking beating. "Matty... _don't_." His voice stayed low and carefully soft-- trying not to make his words sound like an order, Karen thought. "Please don't do that."

Confusion. Matt's expression crumpled a little, and his eyes darted back-and-forth-- trying to figure out what Foggy wanted from him. Karen understood, because she knew had gotten the same look sometimes with Eric. "...Mm, sorry," Matt repeated.

"Don't apologize, bud. You never did anything wrong in the first place."

He just mumbled, indecipherable.

Foggy pressed his lips together, then, "Matt. Are you scared of me?"

The lack of reply told Matt's answer for him. His fingers moved a bit more rapidly, grabbing both strings now, twisting them together.

"Please don't, buddy. Please don't be scared of me. You've done nothing wrong." Foggy sighed. "It hurts to see you like that, Matty." He paused in a short moment of thought. "Inside."

Matt tapped his shaky fingers on his chest, like he was pinpointing the location for himself. "Me, Foggy. A... mm. Again. Me. Hurts." He drummed his fingers again, spoke with a dull, inconsistent pattern of emphasis. " _I_ am sor _ry_."

Karen was watching like it was the last thing she'd ever witness. Both of them shaken by what they'd done to each other. She'd never seen anything like it, not in this world they were caught up in. Forget that it was a human and a feral having an interaction that didn't involve bloodshed, she'd never seen two people with such clear expressions of remorse-- and she _knew_ it was remorse-- on their faces.

"I'm the one that should be apologizing, not you. I hurt you, and I never should have. And I'm really, really sorry about that. Okay?" He started to reach out, slow and cautious, then stopped himself, and simply laid his hand flat on the futon, fingers pointed in Matt's direction. "Come here. I want you here."

Matt's jaw was jumping as he chewed on his tongue, then he blinked slowly, and slid himself carefully over. Karen watched Foggy brush a finger on his arm before pulling him closer-- a warning, she realized, Foggy was telling him that he was there-- and breathing something inaudible into his ear.

Karen couldn't hear it. She wanted to.

But apparently it helped, because Matt smiled again, and turned his head, and nudged their foreheads together. He always seemed so overjoyed whenever he got to do that, whenever he received any sort of physical affection, like he was starved of it-- because he _was_ , she realized, and it brought a cold feeling into the guilt churning in her stomach.

Foggy pushed his fingers up through Matt's awful fucking haircut, making it look a hundred times worse, and grinned. "See? We're all okay."

He'd said, _You wouldn't understand, even if I told you_.

"Come on, Matty. You gotta enjoy the fruits of your labor." He turned around and Matt followed, leaning in as Foggy reached down, grabbing one of the packages. Rounded. "Here. It's a..." he paused to read the label, "...cinnamon roll."

Matt tried to repeat it, but got the letters jumbled. "Cimm..."

"Yeah, cinnamon's a hard one."

"Cimm, cinn," Matt mumbled, taking the package from Foggy as it was offered out to him. He ran his fingers along the edges. "Cinna."

"Almost."

He'd said, _Just because he can't speak doesn't mean he can't understand_.

"Cinn-min," was what Matt ended up with, grumbling as he tried to get the wrapper open, eventually worrying it apart with his teeth.

Foggy nudged him. "And don't share that. It's all for you. Eat the whole thing."

"Cinn-min. Foggy, yes." He peeled back the plastic and it was almost like a goddamned magic trick, he ate the stuff inside so quickly. It was a wonder he wasn't choking on it, Karen thought, but she saw his face light up as he ate. A simple pleasure that had been long denied to him. "Tastes good, Foggy," he said, after swallowing, digging his finger in the wrapper afterward to get the rest of the crumbs out.

"I bet. It's not noodles," Foggy said, the lasagna back in his hands. "It's real goddamn food, Matty. You know, the stuff _you_ got for us."

Matt's eyes were directed at the floor, and he was smiling again, like he had on the edge of the river earlier. Pride, Karen translated, slowly and in the back of her head. He was proud. Happy. She could not remember a time when she'd seen the emotion so bright and clear on the face of the man in front of her. It took ten fucking years off of him.

He laughed, that strange huffing noise like he was half out of breath, and rolled onto his back on the futon. The wrapper was still in his hands and he started folding it and wiggling himself from side-to-side. "Cinn-min. Roll."

Foggy looked over, shoving another bite of lasagna into his mouth. "What are you doing?"

"Itchy."

"Don't scratch it, bud. You'll give yourself an infection."

"A lot _itchy_."

Karen felt the guilt again, a dark ocean at high tide lurking in her gut. It was her fault, for not stopping him from going to that damn boat. He'd gone for _her_. Karen still couldn't find an answer in herself for why she hadn't stopped him. Was it just to see if he'd do it? Because they actually _did_ need more weapons? Or because, in some fractured area in that deep dark pit that her mind had become, she'd _wanted_ to see him fail? She _wanted_ to see a feral get hurt?

No. No, that wasn't true. That _was not true._

He'd said, _He's not an it, Karen, Jesus Christ, he's_ Matt.

"Here, distract yourself," Foggy said, tapping Matt's hand before taking the wrapper, replacing it with something else. "Check that shit out."

Matt's eyebrows crumpled as he studied the crinkling plastic, running his fingertips all up and around it. Karen watched. She never noticed how meticulously he touched things before. And of course he would, because that was how he saw the world around him. "What is?" Matt asked, nudging Foggy's back with his knee.

"Say it right, please?" Foggy's voice was gentle.

"Ugh. Foggy. _What_ is." Matt huffed; his eyes rolled around. "Foggy, what is this?"

"Skittles," Foggy said, then repeated it. "They're Skittles. Candy."

Matt's eyes were darting around again, rapid movements that he didn't even know he was making. His brain working, churning through information, trying to translate it to speech in the shattered avenues of his neurological pathways. Karen wondered how frustrating it was. "...Kit... tells."

Foggy, ever-patient, "No, no. Put an 's' on the front. Sss."

"Sss. Kit."

He spoke slowly. "Skit."

"Ssskit. Tells."

"Yeah, you got it." He totally fucking didn't, but he was close, and that was good enough for Foggy.

Karen kept openly studying the scene in front of her, not even really caring if she got caught doing it. Matt's pronunciations were all over the place. His vocal cords hadn't been damaged, she knew that-- he could still roar and snarl like any other feral. It was a disconnect in his brain, from words to his mouth, but even with Foggy enunciating it perfectly for him, he was missing the mark.

She scratched at a scab on her chin and couldn't stop thinking about it.

Matt still grinned at Foggy's praise. "Ssskit-tells. What is this?" He sat up, shaking the bag slightly, making all the candy inside rattle against itself. The noise alone seemed to have his total attention.

"It's candy. Here." Foggy tapped Matt's arm and took it from him, opening it up. He shook a few into his own palm before handing it back. "See if you like it."

Of course he liked it, there were calories inside. Matt pushed himself upright, itchiness forgotten-- which was a huge victory in itself-- as he picked the pieces out one at a time and chewed them slowly. "It... hm." His eyes moved around like his thoughts moving around in his head. "Difference. Different."

"Yeah, there's different flavors, can you taste them?"

"Yes." He picked out another one. "What... what is this... one? This one?"

"Hm. Red. I think it's cherry."

"Red cher-ry," Matt mumbled, rolling the next piece around in his mouth. He chewed slowly, eyebrows ticking together like he was concentrating on every aspect of having food in his mouth. "Good."

"You like 'em?"

"Yes."

"Lucky you, the MREs come with candy."

Matt tilted his head suddenly in Karen's direction, like he could sense her eyes on him-- and Jesus, maybe he could. He fiddled with the edge of the wrapper, then picked out a few more pieces to give to Foggy before standing up and offering out the bag with his steady hand. Always his steady hand.

"Karen," he mumbled, then spoke louder, as clearly as he could manage. She heard the struggle, saw it move in his expression. "Want this?"

She felt herself smile even though he couldn't see it, and when she spoke his smile grew, and she knew he could _hear_ it. "Sure, Matt." Karen reached up and took the bag, and felt the warmth of his hand and the warmth of his wide grin, and it was Matt again, standing in front of her, the lawyer she used to work for--

No, no. It was just Matt, earnest and gentle. It was _still_ Matt.

Karen picked the Skittles out of the packaging and ate them one at a time. They were hard as rocks and the outer shell was dusty, but they were still the best fucking Skittles she'd ever eaten in her life.

Matt went back to the futon and sat, and Foggy gave him a gentle nudge and the remainder of his lasagna. Matt inhaled it in half the time he'd eaten the cinnamon roll. He even used the spoon. Had Foggy taught him?

"What do you think, buddy? Taste good?"

"Yes." He was licking the foil to get the rest of the sauce out. Desperate for every single calorie, Karen thought, even though he'd still passed around the Skittles like he wasn't.

Her head kept taking facts she'd applied immediately to Matt for being feral, burning them out and replacing them with the image sitting in front of her. A lie, a ruse, a play to get closer to her in order to harm her? No, because Matt no longer knew how to lie, and that was clear and open on every expression that crossed his face in time with the thoughts that crossed through his head, every single one of them as raw and honest as anything could ever be. All of his walls stripped away by the virus, showing her the kind and earnest creature that lay quietly underneath.

He'd said, _Show him where you are. He'll find you._

"All right," Foggy said, leaning forward. "Let's see what else we've got here."

Matt leaned in, nibbling on the foil wrapper of the lasagna. Foggy turned his head and caught him doing it, sighing silently through his nose and reaching up to tug at the corner of the foil. "Matty, that's not food, don't eat it."

"Tastes."

"Yeah, it's been holding lasagna in it for two years. 'Course it's gonna taste like it."

"Hungry."

"I know that. You'll make yourself sick, though. Gimme."

Matt glared in the general direction of Foggy's arm and handed it over. Foggy replaced it with a pack of crackers.

It took all of thirty seconds for those to disappear, too-- Matt ate with quick, desperate bites, and Karen wasn't sure how he wasn't choking on everything. Foggy just blinked when he turned back around and the packet was empty.

"Jesus."

"Hungry."

"Still?"

Matt blinked, and then hesitated, hearing irritation in Foggy's voice. "...Yes."

Foggy caught the hesitation. God, it was like they were both sharing the same fucking brain sometimes. Foggy read Matt like an open picture book and Matt read Foggy's voice like it was a too-familiar song on a CD. "That's okay. I mean, God, you haven't eaten since... um, you went a long time without food."

Three months, wasn't it, when Matt was separated from Foggy? He had to have eaten _something_ , or he wouldn't be alive. Karen tried to think about what it would have been. She'd seen ferals eating pretty much anything they could get their hands on, from mud to tree bark to cans of dog food and fucking insects.

And then, of course, her mind applied those images to Matt, the man sitting in front of her, to him struggling and starving and lost and confused, and her stomach roiled with something deep and cold and she knew it had to be sadness. For him.

It hurt more than the sadness she had for herself.

"We could open another MRE," Foggy suggested, putting his good foot back to the floor. "I mean, there's a ton of them."

Matt tilted his head, then reached out and put a hand on Foggy's leg, wordlessly telling him to stay as he got up and retrieved one from the kitchen. Limping, still, but barely. The legs of his pants were way too long and they dragged on the floor. "I got," he said, voice soft, as he sat back down.

"Yeah, you did got. Get." Foggy winced. "Uh. You got it."

"Hn. I g-got it, Fog," Matt said, then started repeating himself in a soft mumble under his breath. Memorizing the phrase. "Got it. _I_ got it. I _got_ it. I got _it_." He held out the MRE.

"Ohh, chili," Foggy said, grinning as he ripped it open.

They gave Karen everything but the chili, which they shared (Matt stole the chemical heater pretty much immediately) and afterward Matt stretched back out on the futon with his CD player, smiling and full and warm and comfortable, and fell right back asleep again. Foggy found one of his medical books and buried his face in it, and Karen ate. There was a package of cider in this one, too, and she set it aside for later.

The quiet of the living room was nice, but the comfortable, warm feeling that swirled gentle in her chest was _fucking incredible_ , and she knew-- she _knew_ \-- that she was totally, helplessly addicted to it.

 _Show him where you are_ , Foggy had said to her.

Karen sat on the couch and wondered if she hadn't already been found.

\---

She took the rifle into the storage room and went to work on it, and spent most of her afternoon there, at the tiny desk under the single window. Cleaning the rifle out in the off-color afternoon sunlight that was streaming in, slow and patient. She'd managed to get her box of guns up from the garage, too, albeit one at a time, because she wasn't going to make the two dudes with leg wounds traipse up and down the stairs anymore. At the bottom of the box was Jack's bow, and she couldn't even remember grabbing it.

Karen put it on the shelf with the handful of arrows, not sure what to do with it. Jack had taught her, of course, but the weapon was too goddamn slow. Quiet, yes, but hell if she'd be anywhere near as accurate as Jack had been with it.

Foggy's voice drifted in from the living room, and it was soft and low, like he was trying not to bother her.

"...They're fighting with lightsabers all over the bottom of Cloud City, _voom voom._ Swords of pure light! Humming back and forth, over bridges and shit..."

Karen listened, because there was nothing else to listen to. She pushed the microfiber cleaner back through the barrel for the millionth time, checking to make sure it was clear. They didn't need it to misfire, spraying shrapnel or blowing someone's arm off. Foggy definitely wouldn't be able to fix that.

"...And Darth Vader's got Luke cornered now, Matty, he's pushing him back on the bridge with his lightsaber, and Luke is defenseless! Luke's got nowhere to go. And Vader's just moving closer and closer..."

She sighed in vague triumph as she put the magazine back into place. Two hours, and there it was, a goddamned assault rifle ready to tear some fucking aliens apart. Karen set it down carefully, then got up from the awful metal folding chair and stretched her arms, moving back out into the living room. In the morning, or the next day maybe, she'd take it to the roof and test-fire it. It was getting too dark now.

The other two were both on the futon, Foggy telling the story with his legs resting up on the coffee table and Matt splayed across his thighs, face-up, listening as intently as he'd listened for aliens at the shelter. Totally entranced. He had the strings of his hoodie in his hands, wrapping them tight around his thumb, over and over.

"...And Luke tries to get away! Vader gets closer." Foggy's voice dipped down into a growl, a bit like Matt's, but far less dangerous. "'You are beaten! It is useless to resist!' He's waving his lightsaber all up in Luke's chest! 'Don't let yourself be destroyed as Obi-Wan did!'"

Karen grabbed an MRE from the kitchen and went back to her couch, tearing it open.

"Luke fights back! He swings his lightsaber, pushes Vader's away, and gets up! They start swinging at each other again, but Vader's way too strong, Matty, he backs Luke up to the edge of the bridge and _cuts his hand off!"_

Matt was horrified. _"No!"_

"Yes, Matty! Chops it right off. Lightsaber and everything, totally gone! Vader gets close. 'There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you!'"

"No, Fog, no," Matt whined.

"Just listen, Matty. Luke's backing away, he's holding his gross arm stump and crying, there's just a bit of bridge left and he's backing up on it. Vader's still talking to him. 'Luke, you don't realize how important you are! You've only just started to get powerful as shit! Join me!'" Foggy's voice went a little higher. "'I'll never join you!' Luke screams. ...Matt, stop scratching."

"It itchy."

"It _is_ itchy."

"It is itchy, Foggy, it is itchy. _Fucking_. Itchy."

"Your goddamn language, dude. Roll over."

Matt did; Foggy started scratching his back, gently. Karen opened her puck of bread and started eating, watching Matt basically melt face-first into the mattress. She tried to hide her guilt underneath a smile and did a poor job of it. How long would it take for his skin to heal?

"Right, where was I. Oh. So Vader gets closer and closer, and he's still got the lightsaber in his hand. Humming. _Vrrm, vrrm_. It's all fucking windy." Foggy dropped his voice again. "'If you only knew the power of the dark side! Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your dad.'" It went up again. "'He told me enough! He told me you killed him!'" Down again. A long pause. Dramatic effect. "'No. _I_ am your father!'"

 _"What!"_ Matt scrabbled upright. "No, Foggy, that, no!"

"Totally true, Matt, totally true! I wouldn't lie about this! It's the _greatest story ever told_." He laughed, loud and pure, as Matt put a hand on his arm, face strained with worry. "...So Luke's screaming, 'No, nooo!' and Vader's all, 'Join me, and we'll rule the galaxy as father and son! It'll be fucking awesome!' Matt, it's okay, it's just a story."

He made a soft, undulating whining noise. "Foggy, Vader... a _dick_."

"A total dick. I agree completely. Anyway, Luke's not having any of this shit, so instead of joining Vader, he just lets go of the bridge he's stuck on! Drops a hundred stories down!"

Matt was going to have a fucking heart attack.

"But it's okay! Cloud City shits him out onto, like, a TV antennae! Luke grabs it and he's okay. He's missing an arm, but he's okay! He starts crying, 'cause Obi-Wan never told him that shit. Super betrayed."

"A dick."

"Yeah, well, we'll get to that, Matty. Anyway, out of nowhere, here comes the  _Millennium Falcon!_   It's Lando Calrissian and Leia!"

_"Yes!"_

"They grab Luke and take him inside! He's totally safe!"

Matt flopped over and laughed, relieved, like Luke was a real person, and he'd been absolutely terrified for his safety. Well, Karen supposed that it meant Foggy was a pretty decent storyteller.

"And... well, I'll have to tell you more later. That's the end of that chapter."

"Hnnn." A rumbling noise, halfway a growl and halfway a whine, low and soft. Karen couldn't hear any anger in it. Disappointment, that's what it was. Matt's version of it. Vocal cords that wanted to snarl and roar, not speak and hum and enunciate.

"It's okay. Patience, Matty, I'll tell you the rest later. It's getting dark and I'm fucking tired." He picked his legs up off of the table and set them down gently. "Is that okay?"

Matt was already gathering up the blankets. "Yes."

Karen finally spoke up, tucking her legs up on the couch underneath her, placing the rest of the MRE on the floor for later.

"...Did you tell him about the other ones?"

Foggy's glare could cut glass. "There are no other ones."

Karen felt herself trying to smile. "Yeah, there are."

"More, Foggy?"

"There's no mo--"

"You know, the ones with young Darth Va--"

_"There's no more!"_

"Are you sure? I think I remember seeing them. With Jar J--"

"No! No no no no no, no, _no_. No more. Only Luke Skywalker. There are no other stories to be--"

"I want, Foggy, I want."

"Matt, no, she's lying."

"No, I'm not!"

"...Not lie, Foggy."

"Oh, my God. Stop railroading me." Foggy fell backwards on the futon. "Story time over. The saga of Star Wars begins and ends with Luke Skywalker. Matt, don't you fucking start pouting."

Karen felt the muscles in her mouth working. "I thought Luke was in the prequels. As a baby."

"Doesn't count!"

"Whatever, Foggy. It counts."

"Matt, get off me."

"Tell it, Fog, tell."

"Jesus. There's a lizard motherfucker that can't shut its goddamn mouth and space battles and then the lizard asshole goes and fucks it up by tripping over some energy balls and dies. The end."

"Not good."

"No shit, Matt. Get off, I need to pee."

By the time Foggy got back, Matt was burrowed under the blankets. He sighed, and stretched out next to him on his stomach, Karen trying not to watch too closely as Matt deposited himself right between Foggy's shoulderblades, gathering all the covers carefully around themselves.

She opened her mouth in the darkness, and she knew why. "Goodnight, guys."

"'Night, Karen."

Matt made an unintelligible mumble.

Karen stretched out her legs on the couch, pulling the duvet up around her, and listened to them as they settled in. Foggy spoke softly under his breath and she couldn't make it out.

She waited until they were both breathing evenly-- Matt was snoring-- before she rolled over, facing the back of the couch, and fell, quicker and easier than she ever had before, into sleep.

\---

She woke up slowly and let out a sigh as she rolled over, and then hissed as she flopped right down on her back. Biting her tongue to shut herself up, Karen jerked upright, rubbing her face as she moved her feet to the floor.

Early morning. The sun was just starting to come up. All that came through the windows was a dirty grey-green light.

A soft sound grabbed her attention and she turned her head, peering blearily across the room. Foggy was stretched out on his back with Matt flopped over on his chest, their legs tangled in a position that she'd thought was only reserved for lovers. One of Matt's hands was twisted up in Foggy's shirt, like an anchor, as he made low, huffing sounds in the back of his throat.

He was _dreaming_. Karen frowned.

It mustn't have been a very pleasant dream, because his breathing began to carry a faint whine out alongside it. His face twisted and he shifted to burrow his face into Foggy's chest. Then the sobs started up, or that was what she assumed from his weakly jerking shoulders, because he wasn't making a sound.

Foggy must have felt them-- she wondered how he could feel anything past the tremors-- because he roused a few seconds afterward, lifting his head from the mattress and reaching up to rub his forehead. His other hand moved down to bury itself in Matt's hair. "'Ey, buddy," he started in a half-sleepy mumble. "What's--"

He didn't get any further, because Matt jumped upright, pulling himself away from the touch and off of the futon, dropping into an awkward half-sprawl on the floor, panting. His eyes jerked wildly in all directions, some heavy emotion crumpling his face that she couldn't make out in the dim light. She could guess, though.

"Whoa," Foggy grunted, and sat up, reaching for him again. "Matty, you all right?"

Matt flinched away again, and then got to his feet and bolted, into the kitchen. Foggy was up and moving before he was even out of sight, letting out a breath, ignoring Karen as he went after his friend.

A nightmare. She'd had too many of her own to even estimate a count. Some of them had sent her running, just like they'd sent Matt running, and she remembered Foggy talking about how he'd had them. That was before the virus ate Matt alive, though.

He'd said, _I think you have to have memories to dream_.

Karen got up, rubbing her face as she moved across the worn carpet to the kitchen. She expected Matt to be trying to get into the bathroom or down to the garage by now, but when she stepped inside the kitchen, she found him tucked up in a corner with his hands over the back of his neck, shuddering, with Foggy right behind him, dropping into a crouch and talking softly.

"Hey, Matty, it's all right. It's just me. It's Foggy."

"No. No no, no, no," Matt whined, tucking himself up tighter. "No, no, Foggy, no."

"Shh, shh." Foggy crept forward but wasn't quite touching him yet; he seemed to be considering whether he should or not. "Deep breaths, Matty. Everything's okay. Everyone's safe. You and me and Karen in the apartment."

Matt didn't respond to that. He kept heaving into his knees, and all of his sobs were silent even though they were nearing hysterical. Shivering, he grabbed the edge of the worn cabinet door that he was curled against and pulled himself in closer, locking himself away from them.

Foggy let out a breath and rubbed his face, hard. His eyes searched the floor in thought for a minute before he spoke up, voice still gentle and soft. "Matty, what did you see? Was it the river? The bridge? The... the truck?" It had to have been. What else could there be in his head?

It took a minute for Matt to answer, and when he did, it was only a faint, "I hurt."

Karen barely heard it, but Foggy locked onto it like it was a piece of evidence in a court case. "Where do you hurt?" He reached out again, stopped himself again.

"I _hurt_ ," Matt repeated, and pulled himself up tighter. Karen had no idea a human body could make itself so small. "I hurt," he breathed, then ducked his head as if the next thing he said was a horrible confession, that it would bring him a severe beating, "I hurt Foggy. I hurt... I hurt _you_ , Foggy."

"...Oh." Foggy pushed his hands through his hair and sat down heavily. He figured it out the exact same time Karen did: a memory. Him turning on Foggy in the apartment all those months ago. The flare gun. "Matty. You didn't hurt me. I'm right here. I'm okay."

"No. I hurt. I hurt."

"It wasn't _real_ , Matt. It was a dream. You were dreaming."

Karen backed up and leaned against the kitchen island. Neither of them took notice of her. She pushed her fingers through her hair and rubbed her neck. Matt didn't understand what a dream was. He didn't understand that what had played back through his head wasn't real. How fucking horrifying was that?

Matt sucked in a wet breath and didn't budge from his spot. "Sorry. Sorry, Foggy, sorry." An echo of the truck, when he was curled up and shuddering and apologizing for something he couldn't control and was not his fault.

"There's nothing to say sorry for. It's okay." Foggy finally closed the space between them, settling a hand on Matt's back. He flinched, hard, but didn't try running again. "Matty, you didn't hurt me. You never hurt me. It was just a dream, and dreams aren't real."

Matt shuddered again. "...Aren't real," he echoed, voice cracking.

"Not at all. They're just stories in your head. Like Star Wars." Foggy moved his hand up and carded his fingers through Matt's hair, and Karen saw his reflex of a smile as Matt pushed back for more. "Shh, it's okay. C'mere, I gotcha." He brushed his other hand across Matt's trembling shoulders-- he was so gentle, so careful-- and tugged the man against him.

Matt twisted himself up in Foggy's arms, sobbing in that broken, silent way and burying his face in the other man's chest so harshly it was a wonder Foggy didn't get a friction burn. Maybe he did. He didn't seem to care, only wrapping his arms tighter, whispering something into Matt's ear that Karen couldn't hear. His eyes flicked over to her, such a pale blue in the half-light drifting through the kitchen window, rimmed in red. She thought he might say something, tell her to fuck off and stop staring, but then he just focused on Matt again, pushing his fingers through the other man's uneven, choppy hair.

"Shh. It's okay. I promise, it's okay."

"D-d-don't want," Matt breathed, high and afraid, "t' _hurt_ you."

Pain flashed across Foggy's face. His jaw tightened and loosened. "I know you don't. Shh, just breathe. You're going to be okay. Dreams happen. I have 'em too."

Matt just mumbled, voice incomprehensible, and stuck his face in Foggy's neck.

Karen stared, and stared a little more, then moved almost automatically. She went to the island and opened an MRE, gathering up the instant coffee mix. There were two more, in the living room, set aside because they'd all been much more interested in the actual food. She busied herself with gathering water from the purifier into a bowl, with opening and starting the MRE heater, sticking it inside.

Eventually, Foggy managed to pry himself and Matt off of the floor. Matt clung onto him like a dryer sheet, like he was afraid Foggy could just up and disappear at any time. They managed to get to the futon and drop awkwardly down onto it. And Foggy, as patient as he always was, let Matt clamber all over him, push his face into his neck, his shoulder, fiddle nonstop with the collar of his shirt.

Foggy just hummed, and murmured "It's okay, Matty"s, and held him tightly, staring hard at the opposite wall.

He'd said,  _He's mine. I'm his._

Karen had to look away. Digging out a few chipped mugs from a box, she tested the warmth of the water with her knuckle. Not quite yet. She could hear Matt sniffling in the other room, muttering nonsense, and Karen had to stop and stare hard at the bowl as she listened to it. A sound that had once been irritating was no longer so. It was something much sharper and much more painful now.

But Foggy shushed him, and she heard them shifting around, heard Matt's sniffling slowly die away.

The water was hot, finally; Karen poured it carefully into the mugs, and added the instant coffee. She wasn't too sure why, except for the fact that _she_ wanted some coffee, and it was easy enough just to make some for everyone. Karen found that she didn't even want to seek excuses for her behavior anymore. She just wanted to _do something_.

He'd said, _You look like you really need someone right now._

"Here." She set two mugs down on the coffee table.

Matt was curled up in a ball in the middle of the futon with Foggy next to him; they both lifted their heads at her approach and the noise of the cups hitting worn wood.

Foggy spoke as Matt burrowed his face into the mattress. "What's that?"

"Coffee," she said, not looking at them. She pulled the heater out of the water and dried it off with a rag, grabbing her own cup of coffee and returning to the living room, placing the heater on the table as she passed.

Foggy was already finding a cup and lifting it up, breathing in the scent of it. He handed Matt the heater, who balled it up into a blanket and clutched the whole mess to his chest, face still halfway crumpled and his eyes red. His head twitched and his eyebrows went together in either confusion or curiosity. It didn't really matter, as long as it swept that look of devastation off of his face.

"...Thanks, Karen," Foggy said, half-turning toward Matt. His voice fell, careful and soft. "...Do you recognize this smell, buddy?"

"Hn. No."

"It's coffee."

"Coffee," Matt repeated. It sounded like _cough fee_.

Foggy guided one of the mugs into his hand. "It's a drink. Remember the cider from the other day?"

"Yes." He brought the mug up, smelling it, eyes roving around. "Hn."

"It's sort of like that. Give it a try, huh?" Foggy asked, picking up the other mug and taking a sip. A smile came across his face, even though it was disgusting instant crap coffee. "Haven't had this for a long time," he said, to nobody in particular.

Karen was nursing her own, enjoying the warmth of it. Hot coffee, heated meals. That gentle feeling came back into her chest and she smiled, reveling in it, letting it beat back that uncomfortable dark place that was shrinking smaller and smaller into the back of her mind.

He'd said, _I need you to try._

Matt gave it a hesitant taste, and his face twisted up the second it was in his mouth. "Ugh. Foggy, don't want it."

"Aw, really? Karen made it for you and everything."

Now he looked fairly torn up about it. His good fingers drummed silently against the side of the mug. "Foggy, it tastes."

"Bad?" Foggy was taking another drink.

"N-not bad. It, um." Matt huffed. "I... Foggy. Don't know. The word." He tilted his face toward the other man, speaking slow and careful. "I don't know the word."

Karen felt herself smiling as Foggy started beaming, even with his eyes still red. A whole sentence. Rare, but becoming slowly less so. Matt was working so fucking hard, and he was succeeding. As stubborn as he ever was.

"Don't know it, huh?" Foggy asked. "Let's find it."

Matt smiled, a weak and shaky thing, but didn't stop holding the coffee, pushing the back of his trembling hand to the mug, feeling the warm sensation bleeding through the ceramic. "Foggy, yes."

"Okay, so coffee... it's sort of a bitter drink. Bitter is... well, it's not a bad taste, but it's... a lot. A really powerful taste."

"Bit-ter."

"There you go. Is it 'cause it's too bitter?"

"Hm." Matt took another sip, but he didn't make as much of a face that time. "Don't know. It... mm." He drank again, a larger mouthful. "...Not... hm. Is bitter."

Foggy put his mug down on the table. "I think I can fix it. Hold on a sec." He got up and ambled slowly into the kitchen, prodding around, and came back with a pair of small white packets and one of the plastic spoons in his hand. "Here. Let me see, Matt."

Matt didn't budge. "No. Karen gave."

Karen frowned around the lip of her mug. No, wait, she was trying to smile, that's what that was. She'd given him something, and he wasn't going to give it back up again. There was some feeling sweeping in her about it that made her chest warm, but she stayed silent and listened.

Foggy gave her a look. A quiet grin. "Well... that's sweet, Matty, but I'm not gonna steal it. I'm gonna put sugar in it. You know what sugar is." He managed the pry the mug out from Matt's fingers, and then set it down on the coffee table so he could pour the sugar out from the two packets he'd found. Foggy stirred it with the spoon and the noise of the plastic clicking against the ceramic made Matt's head tilt. "There. _Now_ try it."

He tried it, pulling a sip into his mouth, letting it sit on his tongue.

"Better?"

"Bet-bit... not bitter, Foggy."

"No, no, _better_. It's a different word. I know it sounds the same."

Matt rolled his eyes, took another drink. "Words. Need more, mm... difference," he grumbled, then worked on draining the cup until there was just a bit of slushy mess left over at the bottom, which he, of course, dug out with the spoon.

"Yeah, words are assholes," Foggy said between sips.

"Assholes," Matt echoed around the spoon.

"Language."

Matt threw the spoon at him, all of the pain finally gone from his expression, and Foggy tried to catch it but only slapped it out of the air. It went spinning off wildly into the kitchen, clattering on the linoleum. Foggy looked shocked that he'd made such a trajectory happen.

Karen laughed.

It startled everyone in the room, including herself, as she straightened up and resisted the urge to look around to see where the noise had come from. Foggy stared at her and Matt stared at the table. "Uh," she said.

Then Foggy laughed, too. "You sound like someone stepped on a cat."

\---

The day ended too quickly, because of the damned season, but she slept again, deep and silent. She woke up earlier than the others and made coffee for her and Foggy, and cider for Matt, and when the scent woke the latter up, he nudged Foggy awake. They sat, and drank, and Foggy made them laugh, and she wondered how she had lived for so long without all of this.

\---

"Karen, what is this?"

Matt's soft voice made her lift her head from her work table, where she was replacing the scope on Foggy's rifle, something a little more dependable with a tighter focus. She turned half-around on the chair and he was in the doorway-- her mind jolted with a sudden flare of panic, because the door was her only exit and he was blocking it off and he was feral-- but she fought it down with a hard swallow.

His eyebrows crumpled. "I won't... h... I won't hurt you, Karen," he said, softly. Her heartbeat, of course, had given her away. Matt looked honestly and horribly wounded, frowning-- she knew it, because all of his expressions were out in the open, unable to hide behind his hair anymore.

She turned the chair around. "I know you won't," she said, again fighting back the strange worried feeling she was getting just from talking to him. It wasn't worry about him hurting her, that time-- it was worry that she'd say the wrong thing, or that she wouldn't be able to understand him, and he'd get frustrated and shy away. "You startled me."

"Um... sorry," he said, tapping his good fingers against the doorjamb before turning to go.

"No, no, it's okay, Matt." She got to her feet. "What were you asking about?"

He turned back hesitantly, head lowered. Whenever he did, the twitch seemed to get worse. Harsher. He didn't seem to notice. "Um." His jaw was working again, eyes moving, as he reached out slowly and tapped his finger on one of the shelves-- the one that Jack's bow was sitting on. "This. K-..." he winced at his own stammer, "Kar-Karen."

"Oh, that's... it's a bow." She reached out and grabbed it. "It fires arrows."

Matt tilted his head in her direction, scratching at his neck. "Arrows."

"Yeah. Here." Karen took one of them off the shelf and moved to offer it out, then paused and turned it around so the pointed end was at the floor.

He took it carefully, and it looked so strange to see him wrap the fingers of his good hand around it with unerring accuracy while his face was in a different direction and his eyes were bouncing around near the floor. Matt turned it over, touched it with both hands, pushed a thumb over the feathers, rolled a knuckle alongside the sharp end. "This..." he started, pinning his tongue between his lips for a second, "...know this."

Karen blinked, and then wanted to slap herself. Of course he knew it. One of the same goddamned arrows had landed in his fucking leg, and Jesus, he still had the wound. She couldn't come up with anything to say to him. _Yeah, that's the same thing that someone put in you, because you're feral. That's a weapon they used to hurt you and everything that's like you._

Matt blinked slowly, moving his fingers back up to the feathers, expression distant and heavy. He leaned back on the doorjamb, twisting the arrow in his hands, the frown on his face ticking downward. "Karen, this... for..." he hissed sharp and short through his nose, frustration, "...for me? Hurts you?"

She didn't understand. This was the exact thing she'd been afraid of. Karen found herself searching the floor hard as she tried to figure it out. Where the fuck was Foggy? He had to come in here and translate.

No-- she could hear water splashing in the garage. He was showering. Awesome.

For the first time, she was alone in a room with Matt, and she tried not to let her heart try to pound out of its chest, but of course it did.

He heard it, and she could tell, because he looked fucking tortured as he spoke again, repeating, "I won't hurt you," as clearly as he could manage. "Karen. Don't need. Won't hurt you."

Her mind rolled the words over, and put Matt's thought together for her-- and him. He thought she'd brought the bow to fire at him, to hurt him with. He thought she'd brought it for her own protection, because being wounded by it was the only experience he'd ever had with a weapon like that.

She spoke quickly, trying to fix it. "No, Matt, it's not... I didn't take it to hurt you with it."

His head was half-tilted, listening. He rolled the arrow between his palms.

How would Foggy explain? He was so fucking good at it. "It's just another weapon. Like... like a gun. A rifle." Comparisons, Matt knew those, she knew he did. "Except... you don't pull a trigger." Karen reached across the space and took the arrow from him, then offered out the bow itself. "You fire it from this."

Matt's head tilted in the other direction and he reached out and took it, measured and cautious, holding the upper limb in his shuddering hand while running the fingers of the other down the string. His expression twisted; he was immediately interested, and Karen wanted to smile as he started tapping his fingers up and down the string, trying to figure it out. "How?"

"You, um..." she reached out and tugged at the string, and he let go, relinquishing it the second she had her hand on it. Karen fumbled to keep it in her hands. "Uh, you pull. On the string." She held it like Jack had taught her, holding the grip tightly and drawing back on the string with her other hand. "Like that. You see?"

He was concentrating-- she could see his eyes flicking around, his head tilting, the way he pushed his tongue between his lips sometimes when he was trying to talk.

Karen repeated the action for him.

"I see," he said, after a long moment. "Mm... move." He waggled his good hand idly and she wasn't sure what he meant. But goddammit, she was going to figure it out. She could do it without Foggy.

"Here, you try." She held it back out again and he took it, turned it around in his hands, and did exactly what she had done, down to the fucking letter. Karen blinked rapidly, surprised. "Yeah. Just like that."

Foggy had said, _He's smarter than you give him credit for. Seriously._

The curve of the bow was jerking all over the place because of his tremor, and the way he was tightening the muscles of his arm to hold onto it. Karen watched as he pulled the string and relaxed it, pulled and relaxed it, like some kind of idle repeated action he'd do-- some sort of fidgeting.

She spoke the thought in her head without even analyzing it first. "I bet that will help with your tremor, Matt. It might strengthen your arm."

"Tremor, what is this?"

Karen felt herself trying to frown. Oh, right, she knew what he was asking. God, she'd only heard it a thousand goddamn times. "It's... your arm, Matt. Your hand. The shaking."

He huffed and pulled the string again. "Use 'shaking'."

He'd said, _Use 'good.'_

"Sorry."

He'd said, _I don't know the word._

"Hn." Matt pulled it one more time, and held it for a few moments-- the trembling got stronger and stronger, the longer he had it drawn. He let the string go slack, and tilted the bow in his hand as if he were actually looking at it, then held it back out to her. His head was no longer bowed and did not twitch so harshly. There was a soft smile playing around his lips. A painfully-red patch of skin across half his face.

He'd said, _Karen gave._

"Keep it," she told him. "Use it. For your shaking."

His soft smile turned into a wide grin. "Thank you. Karen."

"You're welcome."

She almost pronounced it _yore wall-come._

He spent the rest of the day pulling the string, over and over and over, and Karen tried not to laugh as Foggy threw her a million glares. Because, of course, she'd provided Matt a weapon-- a weapon that he could not use, because of his own failed body.

Karen took the arrows and stashed them in the garage. Matt never asked for one.


	18. tragedy + time (part two)

It started the next day.

"Foggy."

"Yeah, Matt?"

"I want to."

"Want to what?"

"Go."

"Um, no. Your knee."

"I am okay. _Fog_ gy. I want _to_ go."

"Another day, dude. Tomorrow. You can go tomorrow."

"I want to go. I _want_ to go now."

"Not now. Tomorrow."

"Ugh."

"Stop bitching. Eat something. Take a nap."

"I did."

"Did you use the bow?"

"Yes. A lot."

"Then do it again. It's helping, Matt."

"I did. _Foggy_."

"...No, Matt."

"Fog _gy_."

"Not falling for it."

"Fog- _gyyy_."

"Knock it off, Matt."

"I want _to_ go."

"Yeah, you've said that. About a hundred times."

"No. Five."

"Fucking smartass. Sit down and chill out. God. And stop scratching."

"Foggy."

"Ignoring you now."

"Mmmgh, Fog."

"No, dude. You can't go today. I gotta go with you and my leg is still fucked up. You know that. So just chill. Have a nap. Look, there's even a heater over there with your name on it."

"Name? Where?"

"It's... that's a figure of speech, Matt."

"Fig _ure_ of speech."

"Just something people say a lot. Doesn't have to make sense."

"Ugh. Foggy, I want _to_ go."

"I know you do. Tomorrow. I want to be sure I can keep up with you. My leg's still fucked up. And so is yours, for the record."

"Record?"

"It's-- Matt, it means, like-- your medical record. Shh, I'll explain it. You know all the cuts and scratches and shit all over you, all that shit goes in your medical record. And you've got a giant-ass medical record, dude."

"Mmm."

" _Mmm_ , yeah. So not until tomorrow, because I think I'll be okay tomorrow. Can you do that for me, Matty? Wait till tomorrow?"

"Mph."

"Don't grunt."

"F'gy."

"Can't hear you. Get your face out of the mattress."

"Mm. Foggy. Go tomor _row_."

"See? There. Perfect. Done with that topic. Jesus, Matt, _stop scratching it_."

\---

The morning was overcast. Windy. Foggy watched his breath cloud in the air as he stepped past the open garage door. There was still water puddled in the dust at the end of the driveway, creating a swirl of pale grey mud. They were pulling it from below the city, according to Karen, and he'd never even known there was anything down there that wasn't pure goddamn sludge. Probably two-year-old stagnant piss. Didn't matter-- the purifier cleaned it well enough, and Matt drank it, which meant it wasn't poisoned.

He heard rapid footsteps before Matt flew past him, one of Karen's backpacks bouncing on his shoulders. Foggy watched him dart around all over the place, jumping up on cars, in and out of half-crumpled buildings, zigzagging back and forth across the street like a ball in a tennis game.

Well, Matt looked happy, and that was a big difference compared to the previous few days, after he'd had the shit scared out of him by his best friend and his own fucking head. Foggy didn't even know he could dream. He wasn't sure what to do about any of it, besides pray it never happened again. There were probably far scarier memories than the apartment locked away in those dark alleys in Matt's head.

There was a slower pair of feet behind him, and he spoke without turning. "Did you give him the non-decaf again, Karen?"

"Sorry." She did not sound sorry.

Foggy just grunted, rubbing his face. This was going to be a trip. He adjusted the duffel and rifle on his shoulder. Karen had brought the new one, the big fucking machine gun, probably hoping she'd get a chance to test-fire it. Foggy really didn't want there to be a problem so big that it required the fucking thing. Not with two-thirds of their little post-apocalyptic survival team still wandering around with stitches in their bodies.

He sighed, knowing that they were going to have to leave sometime. And one of them was going to get hurt eventually. Probably Matt, because Matt was a goddamn wound magnet, and also an asshole.

It was way better to be pessimistic, Foggy thought. To simply prepare for a shit-show instead of hoping they didn't get one. His life was just a long series of fucking shit-shows, each one nastier and shittier than the last. He sighed and watched as Matt hopped up into the tailbed and then the roof of a truck, then up alongside a windowsill before slipping inside the building entirely.

"Jesus, it's freezing out," Karen grumbled, then dug a knit cap out of her pocket and tugged it on. "Hey, help me with the door."

Foggy dragged his eyes away from the building long enough to turn and pull the door down, then listened to her put the padlock into place as he turned back around. Matt was still nowhere to be seen.

"Hey, jackass! No running off!"

He started down the street, sighing again, trying to keep himself calm. His leg was moving better, much easier. Damn, he couldn't wait to get the stitches out. No wonder Matt bitched about them so much. They were itchy as fucking hell.

Karen huffed after him, wincing as she rolled her shoulder to adjust the weight of the machine gun. "Where'd he go?"

"In that building."

"He'll be okay?"

"He lived without anyone's help for three months, Karen. I think he can handle himself."

She gave a weak shrug and a weaker scoff. "Sounds like you're trying to convince yourself more than me."

He glanced at her, frowning. "If you weren't worried about him, you wouldn't have asked in the first place." They ambled up to the building, and Foggy could hear faint rattling inside, echoing through the broken rooms and out the shattered window.

"Who said I wasn't?"

"The fact that you may as well have _'Kill All Ferals'_ tattooed on your knuckles?"

She gave him a meagre half of a smile. "I don't have that many knuckles, so..."

"You know what I mean." He stepped up to the bottom floor windows that stood gaping, no longer barricaded by anything, and peered inside. He couldn't see anything. "Matt," he called, into the dusty dark. "You still in there?"

No answer.

"Think he's okay?" Karen asked, stepping up next to him, trying to see inside.

"Yeah, he's fine. Just doesn't know how to listen. Never fucking did." Foggy was glad that Matt wasn't jerking to obedience anymore, like he had after the river, but dammit, Foggy didn't want him running off when they had no idea what could be lurking around the area. He called Matt's name into the building again, and still didn't get a response, so he moved back out into the road, digging around in his pockets. Where the hell did he put the--?

Before he could even finish the thought, Karen pinched her index finger and thumb together and stuck them in her mouth, blasting out a surprisingly loud, sharp whistle.

Foggy stuttered, hissed a noise that he hoped translated to _'Shut the fuck up,'_ and gave her a glare. "You wanna do that a little louder, get a dozen fucking ferals on our asses?" Oh, there it was-- his dog whistle, sitting in his back pocket for some stupid reason. He turned it over to make sure it wasn't clogged with mud or dust.

"Sorry. I thought... nevermind." She frowned at the object in his hands. "What is that?" she asked, rubbing her damp fingers on her jeans.

"Dog whistle," Foggy answered.

"I thought you said he wasn't a dog."

He glared at her. "He isn't. But he can hear this thing for miles."

"Jesus, really?" She looked pretty surprised and-- what was that? Amazement. It was plastered on her face like a layer of dust. Fuck yeah. Matt was a total fucking miracle. She needed to _know_ that.

A smile skittered across his lips. "Yeah. His hearing." He moved the whistle toward his mouth, but before he could blow on it, they heard a rattle from above them, and Matt came tumbling down a fire escape, hopping over the railing and dropping himself lightly onto an overturned dumpster and then down to the street.

"Foggy," Matt said, barely winded, covered in fucking dust, which meant of course he would lean in for a nudge and smear it all over Foggy's face. But he was grinning, the wide and impossibly bright one that Foggy would love to bottle and keep, because he was pretty sure it could cure cancer or something. "I found."

Foggy rubbed the dust off of his forehead. "Oh yeah? Got something already?" He'd barely been gone ten minutes.

"Yes." He pulled the backpack from his shoulder, tapped his fingers around for the zipper, and opened it. A box of shotgun shells, half-empty. They still had the shotgun they'd taken from Deborah's truck-- Foggy remembered seeing it on a shelf in Karen's storage room. He tried not to think about Deborah herself, but he did.

Matt rattled the box a little. " _Bull_ ets?"

"Yeah, buddy, that's what those are."

His grin widened-- fuck, all he had to do was aim _that_ fucking face at the aliens, and it'd probably _permanently_ blind them-- and handed the shells out, then dug around in the bag again. He took out a pistol, banged all to hell and more the color of rust than the silver it probably used to be. "Um. Gun. Rifle?"

"No, that's a handgun, Matt," Karen said, stepping up next to Foggy. "Can I see it?"

"Handgun," Matt said, repeating the syllables carefully, then offered it out, holding the barrel in a loose grip. Foggy remembered a startled snarl, Paige hissing in anger in their room at the shelter. For a split-second, he thought she would get her finger around the trigger and pull it, kill Matt right there in the dust, but she just took it out of his hand and started turning it around, studying it.

This was _his_ doing, Foggy thought, his and Matt's. That not everything she encountered had to be met with fury and fear, with knife-edges and gunpowder. The fact that Karen didn't even seem to be noticing the turnabout told him a lot. It made him smile.

She caught it, raised an eyebrow, and ejected the magazine-- empty. "Smith & Wesson," she said, pulling the slide back-- also empty. "Nine millimeter. It needs to be cleaned."

Matt turned his face in her direction, closing the backpack and hitching it back over his shoulders. "Karen, good?"

"Yeah, Matt, it's good."

He grinned, and it translated to, _'Fuck yeah! I did something right!'_ even though he couldn't say the words with his own voice, and was 'doing something right' every goddamn day. With a huffing noise, he circled around them once before climbing up onto a fire escape on the opposite building.

"Whoa, hold on, Matty," Foggy called, trying to wave him back down.

"Hunh?" He didn't come back, but he did stop and lean over the railing, and Foggy tried not to think about how rusted and unsteady the metal looked. God, maybe he _did_ worry too much-- but who could fucking blame him?

"We have to have some way to call you, Matt. Something you can hear, so you can come back to us if we need you."

He tilted his head, face still partially angled at the sky. "Have that. Um. It sounds." His tongue got stuck between his lips and he hummed to, apparently, dislodge it. "Mmm, uh. Sounds. I don't. Know the word."

"My whistle?" Karen asked, and after a moment, when he didn't respond, she stuck her fingers in her mouth and did it.

Matt's head canted so sharply in the other direction, it was amazing that he didn't get whiplash. Yeah, that definitely caught his attention. He tapped his fingers on the fire escape railing. "Yes. A lot, Karen."

"A lot of what?"

"It sounds a lot."

Her face twisted up in confusion as she tried to figure it out. Foggy stepped in to translate. "It's loud," he said. "Probably a little too loud."

Matt smiled. "Foggy, yes. A l... a little too _loud_."

"Here, let's try this," Foggy said, lifting the dog whistle again. "Listen, Matt." He blew into it, and nearly burst out laughing because good Lord, his best friend was going to snap his own neck reacting to these noises. It was a wonder how he didn't just end up with his head upside-down.

"Foggy. A lot. A _lot_ a lot."

"I know. It doesn't hurt, does it?" Past-Matt had flatly denied that it did. Time for the truth to come out, buddy. "Does it hurt?"

"Mm."

"Yes or no?"

"Hm."

"Does it hurt or doesn't it, Matt?"

"Hn. It is _ok_ ay. Foggy."

Well, that wasn't an answer either. You win this one, Past-Matt. Fucker. "You can hear it from really, really far away, all right? If you hear it, you need to come back to us. Can you do that?"

Matt gave him a look like he wanted to say, _'What, are you stupid?'_ but what he actually said was his usual, "Foggy, yes." His feet were shifting around on the fire escape. "Foggy, can I?"

"Yeah, all right. Be _caref_ \--"

Matt was already gone.

Foggy sighed and slipped the whistle back into his pocket. Karen was angling her head back, watching as he surged up the fire escape, hopped onto a window ledge, and scurried inside the building.

“Jesus,” she said. “When he wants to go, he wants to _go_.”

“Yeah. I told you." Foggy started walking down the alley, adjusting the bag and gun on his shoulder. His leg twinged but it was manageable. Not nearly as bad as it had been. "He likes to be high up. Like a fucking cat or something."

"Hmm. Maybe he is. Maybe that's why he naps so much."

Foggy chuckled. "Yeah, that makes sense." Fuck, it made more sense than 'sky opening up like a motherfucking treasure chest and aliens spilling out'. He stepped out into the street, squinting in the green sunlight. There were still clouds to the west, clumped up over the remains of the skyline. The wind picked up and blew at the back of his neck and he couldn't stop his reflexive shiver.

Karen caught up with him. "You guys need better coats."

"I know."

"Let's go find some," she said, starting down the street. "I think there's a shop down here somewhere."

Foggy followed slowly, listening to the buildings on his right, staring at them as he passed. Every once in a while he heard a sound, a footstep or a grunt. Karen led him down the street and around a corner, and he followed automatically, knowing in the back of his head that he shouldn't let himself get so distracted.

"Hey, Foggy."

"Huh?" He nearly needed a pry bar to remove his eyes from the building, but he did it. As he sluggishly looked over, he saw Karen standing across the street in front of what used to be a thrift shop.

"In here." When he didn't move any closer, she sighed. "Foggy, he's going to be fine. Cut the umbilical. He's thirty-five years old."

"Thirty-six," Foggy grunted.

"Thirty-six," she echoed. "Same difference. Come on, let's find some clothes."

Karen went inside and he followed her after a minute, shoving his hand in his pocket to touch the whistle, to make sure it was still there. There were shards of glass that crunched beneath his feet and he kicked up dust everywhere he walked. It had been a small shop, not much more than a half-dozen racks that still had some clothing hanging off them. The air stank of mildew, and the faint scent of the river. A fire hydrant must have burst nearby.

Foggy followed her to the back, where she started leafing through the articles of clothing that were still hanging up. "You've been here before?"

"Here? No. I saw it, uh... when Eric first brought me out here," she said, turning her face away as if to hide what was on it, but there was rarely anything on her face to begin with. Well, there'd been more there lately, at least. "Grab what you think will fit. I've got some soap back at the apartment."

He glanced out the front windows one more time, fiddled with the whistle in his pocket again, then went hunting. There were a couple hoodies that he grabbed immediately, along with some jeans that he held up to his hips and were about the right size. Matt was a bit taller, a lot skinnier. Foggy grabbed all the pants he could find, and the single pair of trainers that looked like they might fit. At least _something_ had to, right?

Karen was bent over a display rack a few aisles away, and stood up with a soft grunt of victory, a pile of differently-colored fabrics bundled in her arms.

Foggy glanced over them. "Scarves?"

"Yeah. You need one, Matt needs one. It's fucking cold."

"Are you sure that Matt should even wear one?"

"Seriously?" Karen raised an eyebrow again. It looked awkward, but she was getting better at it. "Do you think he's gonna snag it on a lamp post and hang himself accidentally, or something?"

"Exactly that." He took the scarves from her and started sorting through them, knowing she was rolling her eyes. "Karen, I nearly lost that prick to the virus, and then the river. A goddamn scarf isn't gonna take him away from me."

"You're right, it won't, because I'm pretty sure he'll be fine with one." She turned away and started digging into another display. "I mean, you might want to be careful, I think it's cold enough it'll freeze him to death immediately if he doesn't have socks on."

Foggy grunted. "Oh. Sarcasm. You're such a joy to be around."

"It's a gift," she responded, deadpan, without blinking. She straightened up again and threw something else at him. "Here. At least give him a hat. Most of his hair's gone. You lose a lot of heat through your head, you know."

"I know. I'm a doctor, remember?" He set the scarves down, then bent and picked it up off the ground. It was a knit cap, much like Karen's. Maybe even hand-made. Dark blue. Foggy pulled it on over his own head to give to Matt later, because yeah, he needed it. Especially now, when he had a hard time keeping himself warm no matter what. Fucking virus.

Karen talked again. "You're _barely_ a doctor."

Foggy glanced at her. She was crouched near a big metal basket that had a long-faded _50% OFF_ sign hanging from it. "Hey, I kept you in one piece, and myself in one piece, didn't I? And don't forget Matt, I've put his ass back together more times than I can fucking count."

"I can tell." Her arms were elbow-deep in a pile of socks, but her eyes were staring hard at the opposite wall. "His skin looks like a fucking road map."

"Hm, yeah, it does." Foggy didn't realize she'd been paying attention to that. He dug back through the scarves again. There was a bright red one, with uneven tassels on the end, and he could already see Matt fucking around with them in his mind's eye. Hell, if Matt wouldn't wear it, at least it'd give his hands something to do. "I told you. No sense of self-preservation."

"Some of those scars are way older than two years," Karen said, extracting a handful of socks from the bottom of the pile. They were a lot cleaner than the dust-covered ones on top. Foggy could almost tell what color they were supposed to be.

"No shit. He ran around at night and kicked the shit out of people before all this. He got stabbed. A lot."

"All while I was working for him, huh?"

"Some of it happened before that."

"That's not the greatest way to reassure me." She stood up, carrying the socks over to the pile of scarves. "Did you pick one out?"

"Yeah."

"Put it in my backpack." She took it off her shoulder and handed it out. "And whatever else you want. We can wash it when we get back." Karen looked back out the front windows, and sighed again before talking. "Shame he doesn't remember any of that... Devil of Hell's Kitchen shit."

"Why, did you want to yell at him about how stupid he was being?"

"I'm sure you did enough of that yourself."

Foggy scoffed, rolling up the pants and stuffing them into the bag. "Hard not to."

She shrugged. Her voice pitched just a little lower, a sign that Foggy translated to 'listen closely, asshole', because it meant she was speaking from somewhere dark and hidden behind those doors in her head. "...I just wish I could have thanked him. You know?"

"You can thank him now. For Eric."

"That was different."

"No, not really," Foggy said, pushing the last hoodie into the bag and carefully zipping it shut. He handed it back to her and gathered up his duffel and rifle again. "Come on. I want to make sure he didn't get himself killed already."

"It's been five minutes."

"A lot can happen in five minutes. Especially with Matt involved." Like falling ass-first into the Hudson. Or getting bitten by a feral.

"Umbilical cord, Foggy."

"Fuck that. It's a bungee cord. The harder we pull, the faster we come back." He stepped back out into the street. It was quiet. "Matty? You out here?"

Foggy didn't get an answer, but a few minutes later there was a loud, gibbering yelp to his left-- about a block away, and before he could even turn toward it, Karen was rushing past him with her rifle. He couldn't tell if the noise was Matt or not, but he hurried to follow her as fast as he could. His leg just wasn't cool with being stretched out yet.

They pushed dust up everywhere as they started down the street, all of it empty except for the usual debris-- cars, pieces of buildings, and people. A lot of people. Skeletons now, big and small, young and old, grinning at them through the pale dust. Foggy always tried to step around them, and usually failed. He tried not to think about them and usually failed at that, too.

Karen led him to a row of houses, brownstone. Not an intact window in sight. There was a growl, a half-snarl, echoing between the buildings, and yeah-- that was _definitely_ Matt. Foggy would recognize that sound anywhere. Deep and booming and filled with an unsaid, _'I'm going to_ fucking _kill you.'_

"Where is he?" Karen asked, looking around, trying to pinpoint the source of the echo.

Foggy shook his head because he couldn't tell either, and pulled his rifle from his shoulder. He kept moving, brushing past her.

There was a yelp and a crack, and Matt came tumbling out of a garage to their right with a curtain rod in his hands and a stringy feral snapping in his wake. He half-rolled, kicking dust up everywhere, then oriented himself, and hopped back to his feet. Another snarl burst from him as he swung out with the rod, just in time to catch the feral right in her goddamn face, gashing her cheek wide open. She went down but didn't stay there, bare feet scrabbling for purchase in the dust, her sharp yowls of pain and anger following Matt's furious growling.

Karen already had her rifle off of her shoulder and lifted up, but Foggy jolted with a gasp and jerked forward to shove the barrel down toward the ground before she could fire it.

"No, no! You'll hit him," he yelled, fighting to be heard over the sounds of the feral and Matt's constant low growl. Karen just glared at him, a look that he'd later interpret as a mix of _'What, do you think I'm an idiot?'_ and _'You're an idiot, Foggy'_. He saw something else there, too, something like fear but far more controlled. He didn't study it for too long.

The feral had both her hands on the curtain rod now, trying to yank it out of Matt's grasp. She was a tough-looking little bitch, tendons visible in her neck as she started snapping at him across the glinting metal. He kept the rod in his hands to keep her walled off, and paced gracefully to stay out of her range. It looked, for a moment, like he was trying to wrestle the makeshift weapon away, but no, he was just moving further and further back and keeping her attention on him instead of letting it shift to Karen and Foggy.

She started snarling, deep and furious sounds, like a stuttering engine, and after a moment Matt started to return them, and his noises were ten times worse. Sometimes Foggy could forget he was capable of making them. Not today.

As Matt was goading her up onto the sidewalk, she suddenly roared and surged forward, shoving her hands hard against the curtain rod. Matt tripped once, stumbling, but instead of trying to correct himself, he moved right along with it. He dropped and rolled backwards, taking her down with him and slamming his foot into her gut at the same time, slingshotting her up and over, and then he followed. She crashed onto her back and then Matt was on top of her, pinning her to the sidewalk and crushing her throat with the curtain rod.

He was panting hard, teeth bared, but didn't let up on the pressure. Foggy could see his knuckles, starkly white as his hands clutched the rod. The feral was still trying to roar and swing out and hurt him, even while he was trying to choke the goddamn life right out of her.

Foggy turned his face half away to avoid having to see Matt strangling her to death in glorious HD right in front of his eyes, but then Matt just let out a low, rolling huff, and instead of killing the feral, he let up. He hopped upright, growling, and threw a hard kick into her hip to goad her to her feet.

Karen lifted her rifle; Foggy shoved it back down again, shaking his head.

The feral coughed, gasping for breath, and skittered away from him as he stood over her. His shadow stretched out ahead of him like something grotesque and unnameable. The growl in his chest didn't quiet as the feral got back up, awkward, listing to the left as they all did.

When she half-turned back toward Matt, his growl turned sudden and loud into a snarl-- Foggy had never heard another feral that sounded _half_ as dangerous-- and he planted his feet, walling her off from Foggy and Karen. She twitched, and huffed, and bowed her head in a way that was a lot like Matt himself. After a minute, she stepped backwards, retreating. He stepped after her, snarling again, and then again, until she started to run.

He followed, shadowing her for a few long strides. A sharp breeze carried dust down the street as Matt slowed to a stop near the corner, listening. His hair twitched unevenly in the wind; his head twitched underneath it.

"What the fuck," Karen breathed, and if Foggy could have found the words, he might have echoed her. Right now, he was trying to figure out what the hell Matt thought he was doing, letting a feral fucking _live._

Another half-minute passed, and then Matt stopped growling, and huffed gently, turning around and moving back to them. He leaned the curtain rod on his shoulder-- it was a heavy thing made of dark brown metal with a curve on either end, screws still sticking out of it. He must have ripped it right off the goddamn wall of whatever building it had come from.

A quiet smile started across his face as he caught back up with them. He wasn't even breathing hard anymore. "Hm, Foggy. Go?" he murmured, moving to pass them, rolling the curtain rod on his shoulder.

"Uh, no, hold on a minute," Foggy said, throwing Karen a glance before stepping forward and stopping him with a hand on his arm. "What the fuck was that?"

Matt halted as he was asked to, and frowned, blinking slowly. "Feral."

"I know it was a feral. Why the hell did you let it live?"

"Hn." He turned himself toward Foggy, tapping his fingers on the curtain rod. It made faint noises beneath his fingers. "Mm, tell it. Go away." His eyes darted around. "Foggy. Mine."

"Your what, Matt?"

At that, he paused, tilting his twitching head around. He gestured vaguely with his shaking hand to the street ahead of them, and the buildings on either side of them. "This. Mine."

Karen finally opened her mouth, blasting out a sharp breath and catching Foggy's eyes with her own. The rifle was still in her hands. "His territory, Foggy. He's claiming territory."

"Hm. Territory, what is this?" _Terry torry._

Foggy shook his head slightly. "It means your... space. Your land. Your... home." Yes, this was familiar. Matt had been the same way, he thought, back at the apartment before the virus took him, but never like this. Never with the virus at full strength. Pressing in like an animal, chasing her out like a dog would chase a cat. Christ. "...It's where we live, Matt."

"Hn. Yes, Foggy. Home. Mine." He thought for a second, formed his words into a careful sentence. "It is _mine_ , now."

"Jesus," Foggy said, rubbing his face.

Matt spoke softly. There was a frown in his voice. "Foggy, not... not good?" He looked bewildered. _I did what I'm supposed to do, now why are you upset?_

"No, no, Matt. It's-- you're good. It's fine. We're good."

He _had_ to be okay with this, didn't he? This was what being a feral was about. His feral best friend, Matt. And God, it was a goddamned miracle they had an explanation for anything that Matt fucking did. To anything the _ferals_ did. They were beyond lucky that Matt had built a bridge across that gap in himself, and could reach out and at least attempt to explain what it was like on the other side.

"Mm, Foggy. You lie."

Fuck. "It's... Matt, it's just... I'm not used to it, okay?"

Matt frowned harder, rubbing his thumb along the underside of the curtain rod. "Foggy, you want... mm. No more? Sorry." He lowered his head a little bit.

"No, it's okay, Matty," Foggy said. "I just don't want her to come back, all right?"

"Won't. She won't."

"How do you know that?"

Matt huffed, as if in impatience, gestured to the street around them again. "This mine."

Claiming territory. Foggy had the feeling if the feral came back, Matt would break her fucking neck. Because for all his gentleness, and all his kindness, he was possessive as fucking hell. Not yours, mine, and all that shit.

Foggy sighed. "...All right, buddy. All right." He patted Matt's shoulder. "Did you get hurt?"

"Mm. No." Of course not. It was eerie, the way Matt could avoid getting hit sometimes.

"Okay. Uh. Good... job?"

Matt didn't seem to register the questioning lilt in Foggy's voice, and just smiled. "Foggy. Yours, Karen's. Mine. Keep it safe." He started walking again, bouncing the curtain rod on his shoulder. "Come."

Foggy and Karen shared a look-- her face was taut, eyebrows crumpled, lips pressed to a tight line. He sighed, knowing that he probably looked totally bewildered and probably a little bit afraid, because that, honestly, was how he felt. One feral, Matt could take on and wound, allow to live, drive off-- but a whole pack? The pack that was supposed to live somewhere around here? He'd get fucking slaughtered.

"Come, Foggy. Karen," Matt called again, hopping up onto another fire escape. "Street. Safe," he said, waggling the end of the rod in the direction they were walking in, before leaning it on his shoulder with his trembling hand, and using the other to climb the ladder on the fire escape to get to the roof.

After a minute, Karen broke their mutual silence. "Jesus Christ," she breathed.

Foggy frowned, felt himself trying to sigh some more. Stopped it, because Matt could hear it, and it wasn't like he was trying to _avoid_ Matt, but conversations like the one he was about to start went better if Matt wasn't there to listen in. "Hey. You okay? Karen, he isn't going to hurt you."

She shook her head, clicking the safety catch on the rifle before slinging it back over her shoulder. "That's not what I'm wo--... that's not..." she sighed and shook her head again, "Jesus, Foggy, that's the second time he's done that."

"Done what?"

"Letting them go. Letting one of those things _live_."

Foggy scratched at the edge of his beard. "You saw him fight another feral?"

She sighed and shook her head, glaring at him. "Eric."

"Oh. Shit, yeah. Sorry. No, he... you said he killed Eric."

"He _did_. But he was... he gave Eric a chance to run first. He gave Eric a chance to live. Eric didn't take it, but... Jesus, Foggy. There's no fucking feral that _does_ that."

"I told you, Karen. He's different."

"But why? What makes him do that?"

Foggy shrugged. "Medically? I don't know. But that-- _that's_ what I'm talking about when I say he kept himself. That's not just 'a feral that used to be Matt.' That's Matt, Karen." God, was she finally letting herself see it? He wanted to sigh so hard in relief that he'd deflate, but he knew she'd pick up on it. He knew she would. "Our _friend_ , Matt."

She nodded slowly, looking back up in the direction the man in question had gone in. "Our friend who still mumbles and evades questions like a fucking professional."

"And is too goddamn generous for his own fucking good."

"...And hates my coffee."

Foggy found himself laughing, weak and slow, and she laughed right along with him. The sound bounced up the walls of the building. He swore he heard Matt's huffing echo.

\---

Two hours later and they were back at the apartment, Matt still running around all over the place with the curtain rod in his hands. It looked like he was probably going to keep it, Foggy thought, when he caught sight of Matt catching the hooked end on the edge of a roof and using it to haul himself up. Thank God it wasn't one of those cheap white aluminum bastards.

Karen unlocked the garage and pulled it open, grunting in relief when she got the rifle and backpack off of her back, setting them on the stairs. She rolled her shoulder and grumbled as she pulled her knit cap off of her head and pushed her fingers through her hair. "He's gone again?"

"He's across the street," Foggy answered, stretching his leg gingerly. No ripped stitches, no fresh blood. Just sore as all hell. He sighed and dug the whistle out of his pocket, leaning against the garage's outer wall and blowing into it.

Matt came scrambling back in goddamn _seconds_ , and of course now he was totally fucking covered in dust. He sprinted across the street and right to the apartment, directly to Foggy's side. As he slowed down, he was limping slightly. "I come, Foggy, see?" he panted, and grinned, and nudged their foreheads together.

Foggy reached up and brushed his fingers through Matt's uneven haircut, tossing about a half-ton of dust into the air. "Yeah, you're gonna break a goddamn leg running around that fast."

"I won't." He pulled back, pawing at his hair, trying to help get the dust out. All he ended up doing was a stellar job at tossing it through the air and down onto his own face.

"You're limping, buddy."

"Hurts not a lot," he claimed, rubbing his nose. "Shaking."

So it was the tremor, not the knee. Foggy wasn't sure what to think about that. He took the curtain rod out of Matt's hands and leaned it against the wall, then leaned out of the way as Matt pulled a face and sneezed.

"Gross, dude."

Matt didn't seem to notice. "Foggy, I can go? Again?"

"Not right now. I want you to eat something."

"Okay." Yeah, he wasn't gonna argue with food. Matt kept right on smiling, and when he bounded toward the stairs to get an MRE, more dust came off of his clothing like phantom clouds of smoke. At least Foggy had found more for him to wear.

\---

They ate, and went through the clothing, taking the soiled ones down to the garage and washing them, then stringing them up to dry. And just as Foggy predicted, Matt was all over the red scarf the second it was given to him, almost instantaneously fucking around with the hanging tassels. Like his hands were magnets to things he could endlessly mess around with. Foggy gave him the knit cap, too, and of course the first thing Matt would do was pull it on and start running his palms over the knitting as it stretched over his head. Then, of course, the second thing he did would be to grab the extra fabric and tug it all the way down over his eyes. Obviously. Because he didn't need his eyes, and Foggy _really_ wanted a stark visual reminder of how absolutely idiotic his friend had been before the world died. "Hm."

"Try these shoes, too."

They fit well enough, and weren't pitch-black with staining from the river water. Matt looked like a strange parody of himself from two years ago, a similar silhouette with a wide grin and a twitchy-as-fuck head. He stretched out on his back on the futon and fell into a nap with the red yarn of the scarf tangled up in his fingers.

Foggy sighed, and shared a look with Karen that he was pretty sure spoke a mutual, _'This fucking asshole, Jesus Christ.'_ He went to one of his books, and Karen went to the storage room to clean the handgun.

When Matt woke up two hours later, he opened his mouth before he'd even sat up.

"Foggy, I want to go. Again."

"I don't know if I want you to go alone, dude," Foggy answered without pause, marking the spot in his book before shutting it. "What if you get hurt?"

"I come back," Matt answered. The loud and annoyed _Obviously_ went unsaid, because he didn't know that word. He sat up, pushed the fabric of the cap off of his face, yawned, and immediately went back to fidgeting with the scarf tassels.

"What if you _can't_ come back? How are we supposed to know you're hurt and need help?" Back at 6A, they'd used the flare gun, but Foggy didn't have it anymore. Something he'd lost in the destruction of the shelter-- and besides, the last thing he wanted was another one of those around. Too many bad memories. And a bad smell that might be frighteningly-- and confusingly-- familiar.

Matt's eyes darted around in thought. "Hm. Make a lot sound."

"With what?"

"Karen make."

Foggy felt his mouth twisting up. "Her whistle? I don't know how to do that, Matty. Do you?"

Matt hummed. "No." He got himself up off the futon and went straight to the storage room, where Karen was still working. With only a little bit of hesitation, he leaned into the doorway and drummed his fingers on the jamb. "Karen." Foggy watched him shift on his feet for a second, then move inside the room.

He couldn't see either of them, but he could hear them. Karen's voice was soft, partially muffled by the wall. "Yeah?"

"You can... teach? Teach me?"

"Teach you what, Matt?"

"The... hn. The sound. Sounds a lot sound. Whis. Ull."

"Whistle? You want me to teach you how to whistle?"

"Yes."

Foggy went back to his book, but wasn't reading it. He was mostly trying to fight off his own goddamn grin as he listened to Karen and Matt interact, each of them as awkward as the other. Talking to each other without Foggy having to intervene or, more importantly, translate.

"Uh... yeah. Yeah, I can teach you. Uh." There was creaking from her shit folding chair as she got up from the desk. "Okay, both fingers in your mouth, Matt. Like this."

A huff. "Um. I can't see." No shit. His words nearly made Foggy laugh. But he knew Matt didn't mean in it the traditional sense-- it was because he couldn't pick up enough movement off of her to form a mental image.

"Damn. Okay, you gotta do it like..." Karen fell silent for a second. "Like that. Okay? Blow into them right here."

"Hn. Yes." Foggy heard him blowing air into his hands for a moment. "Mmmmng." That low rolling noise of frustration, but not nearly as strong as it got when he couldn't figure out what words he was trying to say.

"Yeah, it takes a lot of practice. Uhh, here. Feel this." More silence. Foggy didn't dare to move, lest he break the spell. Not only was Karen trying to teach Matt how to do something, she was trying to teach him in a way he'd understand. She deserved a medal for that shit. "Your hand's gotta be like that."

"...Yes."

Foggy heard Matt hum softly in thought, then the harsh, sharp noise of the whistle, from Karen. "You get all that?" she asked.

"Yes." Foggy heard him blowing again. And again. And again. And then two more times before he succeeded, creating a sharp, high blare of noise that made Foggy jump. Matt laughed, and so did Karen, a harsh huffing noise and an awkward strangled sound that tangled together into something inappropriately awesome. Matt did it again. "Karen, listen!"

"I'm listening! That's great!"

Matt laughed again, and came barreling out of the storage room. "Foggy! Listen!" He whistled through his fingers, high and sharp, and fuck, it was totally loud enough to be heard from a distance. Well, this had backfired.

Still, Foggy was grinning. "Nice, dude!"

"Is nice!" Matt repeated, excited as anything. It was horribly contagious. "Karen, Karen, thank you!"

She was leaning against the storage room door, smiling. "You're welcome."

Matt grinned in her direction, then Foggy's. "Okay! I can go."

Foggy wanted to say no. He really did. But Karen was right-- Matt needed freedom. He needed to go out, needed to be in the city, because even with the virus taking almost everything away, Foggy knew he still wanted to be out there. That he still loved the damn place, even if he didn't remember it, even if it was nothing but bones in the dust. Keeping him locked up in an apartment was cruel to all three of them.

So Foggy sighed through his grin, nodded, and gestured to the door to the stairs. "Okay, Matty. But you need to be careful, all right? Don't do anything stupid."

"Not stupid," Matt said, and yeah, he was right. He'd never been more right. "Be okay, Foggy." Still grinning-- and it was a shame they couldn't use solar panels to absorb the fucking brilliance-- he leaned in, gave Foggy a nudge, then snatched his curtain rod up from where he'd placed it in the corner, and thundered right out of the apartment. Karen followed him in order to get the garage door open.

Foggy listened to her teach Matt how to open it, keep it open, and lock it, and he was pretty sure his grin was going to outshine Matt's soon.

He opened the living room window to listen for the whistle, and went back to his book.

\---

Matt came back three hours later, scaring the shit out of both Karen and Foggy as he climbed in straight through the window and tumbled to the floor. Dust everywhere, but with a backpack on his shoulder and a smile on his face and not a scratch on him.

Still, Jesus. "Christ, Matt, at least let us know you're here first."

"Sorry," he said, hurriedly, because he was far more interested in greeting Foggy with a bump, then dropping his backpack on the coffee table. "I found."

Foggy wiped his forehead. "What did you find?"

Matt laughed, earnest and excited. "Don't know! Tell me." He opened the backpack and started taking stuff out. It was a wide variety of bullshit.

"That's a lanyard."

" _Lann_ yerd."

"Yep, you put keys on it." Foggy could see why Matt had snatched the thing-- it was made out of about a million tiny beads, and when Matt picked it back up and set it aside on the table, he had to pause for a long moment to run his fingertips over them in fascination. "Cool, Matty."

Next.

"That's an old Chap Stick."

"Chap Stick, what is this?"

"It's sticky stuff you rub all over your lips. If they get all dried out." Foggy picked it up and didn't dare to open it. Something had already leaked out from under the cap. "Kinda gross. Who knows what put their nasty lips all over it last?"

Matt licked his lips and hummed, then went to the next item. Karen got up off of the couch and came over, and Foggy could see the curiosity on her face.

"Foggy, feel this," Matt said, and dropped something fuzzy in his hands.

It took a large amount of willpower not to drop it immediately, because anything fuzzy in their non-fuzzy world was bound to be a giant pile of mold or a dead animal. Foggy wanted to wince as he lowered his eyes to see what it was.

A set of fuzzy dice, like the ones that would hang on a car's rear-view mirror. The fabric wasn't even stained, and was a glaring neon-pink color. Foggy pushed a thumb over one of them, the little sewn-in dots that denoted the number. "Where the hell did you find this?"

"Hm. Don't know w... don't know the word," Matt said, leaning in close. "It feels."

"Yeah, it's really soft."

"What is this?"

"It's fuzzy dice for your car."

"Your car," Matt echoed, then gently took them back and handed them to Karen. He turned away and went to dig into his bag again before she could hand them back or refuse them. "This one, Foggy."

"That's a stapler." He explained what a stapler was.

Matt listened closely, bobbed his head awkwardly in a half-nod. "This one."

"Cellphone case." Second verse, same as the first.

There were about a million fucking things in Matt's backpack, but he took out every object, and Foggy told him what they were, and explained what their purpose was. Matt hung on every word, eyes moving around slowly. When he'd exhausted his supply of random things and Foggy had exhausted his supply of mental energy, Karen came around with a cardboard box and helped to put it all away.

Foggy wasn't sure what the fuck she'd ever use a stapler for, but she was a motherfucking genius with fixing shit, so maybe she'd fashion it into some kind of high-powered projectile weapon.

They ate, and Foggy coaxed Matt down into the garage to rinse all the goddamn dust off of himself. It took a while, because Matt was still nervous about the whole 'getting splashed with water in the garage' thing, but Foggy talked to him in endless hushed tones and stayed with him the entire time. Afterward, he pulled on a new set of clean clothes and, for once, didn't look like the wallrunning feral he actually was.

As night fell, they lay on the futon, with Karen on her couch, and Foggy quietly recited the ending of _Return of the Jedi._ Matt was snoring before Admiral Ackbar declared to the rebels that they'd fallen into a trap, and he was pretty sure Karen was asleep, too.

Foggy rolled over, and Matt got a handful of his shirt and pulled himself in close before relaxing with a low sigh. Foggy shut his eyes, a warmth curling in his chest that guided a smile onto his face, and fell asleep, and didn't dream.

\---

They fell into an easy routine. It was a lot like when it'd been just Foggy and Matt in 6A, except now they had Karen, who fit in so well that he could scarcely believe how long they'd gone without her there.

She always woke up first, and made coffee, when they had it. Sometimes it was tea, or powdered juice, or whatever Matt could dig up and scavenge from the city because he was expressly forbidden from returning to the river. (Not that he did-- Foggy could tell how badly the whole incident had rattled him. The shower still made him flinch from time to time.)

Matt would always wake up second, usually with a grumbling growl and a stretch that would rouse Foggy, and then their day started. Matt was gone most mornings, leaping out with a wild abandon into the city. He'd come back around noon, then eat, then fall asleep for a few hours before getting up and going right back out again.

During the day, Karen did a lot of work in the garage, in the storage room. She fixed weapons and guns, put their truck back together, installed a second spotlight on the roof and even installed an aluminum ladder near the outside window for Matt. Because of course, he never wanted to come in through the fucking garage like a sane person, unless he was injured.

Which happened _way_ more than Foggy was fucking comfortable with.

Mostly, it was territory squabbles. Matt pushed his borders outward, and the pack in the neighborhood next door learned very quickly to respect them. It was much like back when they lived in 6A, before the old Matt had died in his sleep and the new Matt had risen from his ashes. Even then, he'd had territory, and the ferals understood that, and stayed out. Now, the defense of his space was simply second nature to Matt, who knew his place, and knew what he needed to do-- Foggy knew that it was all instinct-- so he did it. A lot.

And got the shit kicked out of him a _lot_. The more things change.

But Foggy was always there with the damned medical supplies, cleaning out scratches and bites and always trying to ignore the victorious grin on Matt's face when he'd claimed another city block as his own.

Sometimes they went out together, when Matt needed someone with actual eyesight to help him identify something. Within a week, Matt knew his territory like the back of his own fucking hand. Every single shop, every single building. His memory was still fucking phenomenal, even though his speech was not. The parts of Matt's brain that had been permanently damaged didn't seem to include his ability to retain information.

Foggy got a rather pointed example of that when he came across some Braille books while out and about with Karen. One of them contained a translation page. He didn't even think twice before showing them to Matt, and helping him learn, all over again, how to read.

It took Matt all of three days to figure out the alphabet, and then simple words. Speaking them was far more difficult-- but he learned, and he learned _fucking fast_ , almost faster than Foggy could teach. His feral best friend was still the smartest fucker in the goddamn room. And although he couldn't complete a goddamned sentence without stumbling on the words, he still retained, analyzed and memorized Braille like a fucking pro.

Foggy would find the term hidden deep in one of his medical books, a week later. Aphasia. He was heartened that there was actually a name for it. Matt couldn't pronounce the word worth a shit, which confirmed Foggy's secondhand diagnosis in itself.

Neither Karen or Foggy cared that Matt couldn't pronounce it, because Matt didn't need to. The strength in him wasn't in his words, but in his will, and his tenacity, just like Karen's strength was in her practicality and knowledge, not her emotions, and Foggy's strength was in his pop culture knowledge and stitches, not his athleticism.

Matt kept them fed, and Karen kept the purifier running, and Foggy kept them both in one piece as the freezing world around them spun onward. He finished telling the story of Star Wars and moved onto Star Trek. Deep Space Nine, because it was the last one he could remember watching, and his memory of it was the clearest.

They were both obsessed after two nights, the nerds. They kept asking for more, even during the day, neither of them patient enough to wait until evening to hear about the next twist in the story. Foggy took it as a compliment and tried not to put too much of his own personal flair on things.

Worf still got to hook up with Dax, and that was pretty fucking important.

The world spun. With every day that passed, Foggy saw a little less of Paige and a little more of Karen. She talked more, smiled more, laughed more. He made it his (secondary) mission in life to get her to laugh as much as fucking possible. It still sounded like a strangled cat. Matt's still sounded like an angry, out-of-breath dog.

The more time that passed, the less Foggy could imagine living without either of them. And when they settled in for the night, and Matt wiggled in close against his side and Karen begged him to continue the story of the space station next to the wormhole, he knew that they felt the same.

\---

Three weeks after the _Great Hudson Splash of 2018_ (a name that Foggy applied only in his own head), he woke up far too late and rolled over to see Matt standing at the window, frowning.

Foggy sat up and yawned. "What's the matter, buddy?"

"Hm. Don't know," Matt answered, resting his lower arms on the sill. He had his knit cap on, and his red scarf-- dressed to go out into the city, like every morning.

"You going out?"

"No."

Well, this was strange. The only time Matt didn't leave in the mornings was when Foggy had to keep him inside because, well, rules one and four. He still had them and he was sure as hell still going to use them, and of course Matt had them memorized even if he couldn't recite them aloud without ten million pauses.

"Why not, Matt?"

"...Don't know."

"Huh? Are you feeling okay?" Foggy asked, finally putting his feet on the floor and standing up. His leg still twinged some in the mornings, but the gashes were mostly fading scabs and scars now. He crossed to Matt's side, trying to see if he was pale, but something else caught his eye out the window. Something bright and uneven-- a reflection. A reflection of the sky in water, which was puddled in the street, because it was raining.

It was _raining_. Foggy stared out the window, gaping. It hadn't rained in nearly a fucking year. He didn't even know that it _could_ rain anymore.

"Jesus."

"Not good."

"No, no, it's not."

He heard feet on the garage steps and turned to see Karen with an oily rag in one hand and a wrench in the other. "You see that shit?" she asked, waving at the window with the wrench.

"Yeah. It looks like... fucking paint."

It started to pick up, and a sharp wind blew it against the window, and it fucking _did_ look like grey paint. The hiss of the water hitting glass was a strange, unfamiliar noise.

Matt hummed, disappointed, and leaned his forehead on the window. The water looked like it had been brought over directly from the Hudson. Which meant it would do the same thing to Matt's skin that the Hudson did. He'd just _recently_ healed from that-- and there were still a few fading red patches on his skin, even after three weeks.

Foggy sighed. "I guess you'll have to stay in, buddy."

Matt groaned like he was dying. Drama queen.

"Stop bitching. Come on, let's get through the rest of your book."

\---

It was a good thing that it was still raining four days later, because as it turned out, ferals were pretty fucking good at cracking teeth, and one of Matt's became totally fucking infected and he had to be sedated with the goddamn ketamine to yank it out of him. Foggy'd had better weeks, truly, but pulling a tooth out of his best friend's head while he made those Godawful high whines while  _under sedation_ was pretty much the worst thing he'd ever had to do to him. Well, maybe the second worst. After the flare gun.

And thank fuck that Foggy had the alacrity to pull the goddamn thing out, because it probably would have killed him. Foggy didn't like thinking about it. So, obviously, he thought about it a lot.

Matt recovered like he always fucking did: with endless complaining and restlessness because the second he could walk, he no longer wanted to be stuck inside the apartment. It was a good thing they had Karen, because she was fucking awesome at distracting him, having him help her in the garage and even, shockingly, helping him build a box to put his spoils of war into. Which was the tooth, of course, after it had cracked in half while Foggy yanked it out of him with needle-nose pliers.

The rain came and went, came and went. It was a drizzle, mostly, creating a fog that smelled like death and froze up in the mornings. Matt hated it, but still ventured out whenever it wasn't actively coming down. They still needed food, after all, and Matt still needed to keep the other ferals off of his fucking lawn.

It was one of the _really_ fucking cold days when Matt came back from a supply run with a grin on his face that told Foggy he'd found something amazing. Amazing to Matt, anyway, which could be anything from a pen that made a cool noise when he clicked it to sealed chocolate to half of a glove with an interesting texture.

Foggy lifted his head from one of the Braille books-- he was teaching himself, sue him, he wanted to make sure Matt learned how to read correctly-- and looked over as his friend climbed carefully inside, bringing in a rush of icy air with him.

"Jesus, it's freezing," he mumbled. "You still have all your fingers, dude?"

"Yes." Matt shut the window, then wiggled his hands in Foggy's direction to prove it. Setting his curtain rod against the wall, he pulled off his knit cap, scratching his head as he toed his boots off. He went over to the futon, sitting next to Foggy with a huff of air.

Christ, Foggy could _feel_ the cold on him, even from a foot away. He grabbed the fleece blanket and handed it over, but Matt was far more interested in what he was digging out of his backpack.

"Foggy, look." He brought it out, holding it in his right hand with a gentle and reverent grip.

It was a CD, still sitting in one of those cases that used to hook onto car visors. Unbroken, albeit a bit scratched up. Foggy laughed. "Nice, dude! Where'd you get that?"

"Hm." Matt rolled his head from side-to-side, thinking. They'd been working on him actually trying to give directions, instead of vague gesturing. "Two blocks. North. Hmm, in street. In the street." He turned and dug his CD player out from under the futon. "It works?"

"We'll have to see," Foggy said, keeping his tone cautious. The damn thing could very well be scratched beyond repair, unplayable. Well, Karen might be able to do something with it if it was. "Here, hand me the player."

Matt passed it over, as gentle as he ever was with it. His fingers were fucking ice cubes. He leaned in as Foggy opened it up carefully, taking out the Vivaldi CD and blowing the dust off of the other one before sticking it in. It was gold-colored, and he could just barely make out the number _1973_  on it in bold print.

There were footsteps on the stairs as Karen came up from the garage. She was building another spotlight-- this one for the roof.

"Hi, Matt," she said, wiping her forehead as she sat on the couch.

"Hi, Karen," he replied easily-- he'd been practicing his greetings, too. He tilted his head in her direction, but wasn't leaning away as Foggy carefully shut the player and hit the power button. "I found a... I found a CD, Karen."

"Oh wow, really?"

Foggy put the headphones up to his ears, chewing his lip. He waited, watching the CD spin behind the window, and Matt blinked and waited patiently right alongside him, fiddling idly with his scarf.

When a voice started singing, Matt was beaming almost before it became audible.

"Hey, it works!" Foggy laughed, and handed the headphones over, watching Matt tug them onto his ears and grin at the air as the music played. Totally fucking hypnotized.

Karen's usual cracked smile was getting a lot bigger, curving the harsh line of the scar on her cheek. "I can hear it," she said.

"Yeah, I think it's some older stuff." He couldn't quite make out the lyrics, but it was a woman singing. "The cover said '1973'. Do you know any songs from then?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe if I heard them."

Foggy leaned in closer to try to pick up more sound, and Matt noticed. He tugged the headphones off his ears and held them out. "Foggy, listen," he said, his voice as reverent as anything. "I like. I like it. A lot." Matt was practically _buzzing_. He'd never looked so fucking happy about something so fucking small.

But Foggy took the headphones, and pulled them on, and the woman's voice bloomed in his ears. It'd been so long since he'd heard a voice outside of Karen's and Matt's that it stunned him for a few seconds.

_'...And did I hear you say, he was meeting you here today, to take you to his mansion in the sky?'_

It was the best fucking song he'd ever heard in his life.

Matt let him listen for a minute, then passed the player to Karen-- and she liked it, too.

_'Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?'_

When she handed the player back, it was going to the next song. Matt let Foggy and Karen pass it back and forth, because he could hear it just as well without the headphones on if he focused. Which he did, head tilted sharply, and the grin on his face never once fading away.

All of the songs after the fourth skipped, and were mostly jumbled noise, but Matt didn't care. He had four songs. Four _new goddamn songs_ that he could listen to.

The fourth was immediately stuck in Foggy's head the second he heard it.

\---

He was still fucking singing it two days later.

_"Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain, with the rain in Shambala,"_ he droned, cooking noodles on the camp stove in the kitchen, and he knew his singing voice still sucked fucking balls, but he didn't care. He had something to sing, and _reason_ to sing, so he was going to fucking sing. _"Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame, with the rain in Shambala..."_

Even Karen was humming along in the storage room.

And Matt-- Matt thought that Foggy's singing was the best thing he'd ever heard in his life, apparently. Every time Foggy opened his mouth and let his tuneless voice pour out, Matt lifted his head and listened. Every single time. He almost preferred it to the CD itself.

Scratch that, he _totally_ preferred it, because whenever he had it playing, and Foggy started singing along, he turned the player off and listened to Foggy instead.

Like right now. Matt drifted into the kitchen and clambered up onto the countertop, sitting cross-legged, because he had the worst fucking table manners in the world. He was there half to listen to Foggy and half to absorb residual heat off of the camp stove.

The noodles smelled all right, Foggy thought, as he started howling the chorus.

When he started through the song a second time, Matt was softly howling right along with him. The rain tapped quietly on the windows in the living room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _When faced with tragedy, we come alive or come undone._  
>  Rise Against
> 
> \---
> 
> The first song on the CD is Delta Dawn by Helen Reddy. The fourth is Shambala by Three Dog Night.
> 
> If you'd like to read about Matt's adventure with a dental abscess, click [here.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4917997)
> 
> If you'd like to read about Foggy's adventure with Matt and his Braille, click [here.](http://sunshineverse.tumblr.com/post/128899908124/i-received-this-prompt-twice-so-here-ya-go-it)


	19. no oath, no spell

Foggy was singing in the kitchen. Again.

_"Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain, with the rain in Shambala..."_

Karen blinked and lifted her head from the shotgun she was working on. She could hear his feet ambling around, heavier than Matt's near-silent gait. Matt was probably up on the counter, because apparently that was _his_ spot now, just like the chair in the storage room was hers.

Foggy still could not carry even half of a tune. He'd also been blaring out the same song for four damned days. He could have at least switched to _Leroy Brown_ , but nope.

_"Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame, with the rain in Shambala..."_ he continued, nonplussed by his lack of singing voice. What little tune she could pick up was close enough to the actual song, just... not the best. She could hear the grin in Foggy's voice when he got to the easy part-- the uncomplicated part of the chorus-- and Matt's voice tentatively joined in.

Matt could actually sort of sing, she thought, but he only voiced the parts that he could howl softly alongside his friend. She could hear the smile in his voice, too, as he quietly belted out the _Yeahs_ in the chorus.

Karen found herself humming along, under her breath, to herself. She turned the shotgun over, clicking open the break-action, pushing the microfiber cloth through the barrel.

They kept going. Foggy really fucking sucked at it.

_"Tell me, how does your light shine, in the halls of Shambala? Tell me, how--"_

_"--How does your light shine, in the halls of Shambala?"_

She nearly dropped the goddamn shotgun on the floor. Karen jolted upright like the chair had shocked her, because that second voice was _Matt_ , handling the syllables with a baffling amount of grace and skill. Absolutely nothing like how he talked. Jesus, he almost sounded like the lawyer she used to work for.

Matt's singing must have stunned Foggy, too, because he fell silent for a minute.

"...What the fuck, Matt?"

"Huh?" Now, that sounded more familiar. "Foggy, what?"

"That was really fucking clear, dude."

"Cl-clear?" Matt sounded anxious. "Not good?"

"No, that-- that was anything _but_ 'not good'. What the fuck. How did-- when did you learn how to sing?"

"Um." Matt was starting to sound frightened, now. "Um, sing?"

"What you were just doing! Matty. _How does your light shine, in the halls of Shambala?"_

_"Tell me, how does your light shine, in the halls of Shambala?"_

"That. That's what I'm talking about. What the fuck."

Matt huffed a nervous laugh. "Foggy. I like to sing." It sounded like it was a piece of himself that he'd just then discovered. Maybe it was. "Is okay?"

Karen pushed herself upright and got to her feet, shuffling toward the kitchen.

"Hi, Karen," Matt said, like he always did. Every time, it got just a little bit more fluent. He was cross-legged on top of the kitchen island, as suspected. The knit cap was on his head, a package of crackers in his hands that he idly fiddled with. He'd finally stopped inhaling his food all at once, and had even put on a couple of pounds.

She grunted a "Hey," at them both as she stepped into the kitchen.

Foggy was leaning against the wall next to the purifier. His jaw was trying very hard to get intimate with the kitchen floor. "Did you hear that shit, Karen?"

She tried to keep the emotion out of her voice, but was fairly sure she did a shit job of it. "Yeah. He sings better than you do." Her voice cracked on the last half of the second sentence. Fuck it.

"Rude."

Matt laughed.

"Don't you start in on it," Foggy said, and he was trying to scowl, but couldn't. "You have the weirdest fucking brain, man."

"Weirdest fucking brain," Matt echoed, leaning toward him, eyes roving around. A slow, prideful grin was creeping across his face. "Works."

"Yeah, it works. Sideways."

Karen leaned against the opposite wall, feeling her mind wandering around with this new handful of information. Could he sing anything, or just the song that Foggy had been repeating on an endless loop for the past week? How could he sing when he couldn't talk worth half a damn? She scratched at her jaw and stared at the floor, unable to get the thoughts out of her head-- not that she was fighting too hard to be rid of them.

Again: fuck it.

Foggy stepped away from the purifier and toward the kitchen island. "Okay, Matty, say, 'How does your light shine, in the halls of Shambala'. Say it, don't sing it."

"Mm. How d-does your... mm. Light. Shine in. The..." he trailed off, and Karen could hear the frustration in his voice. Frustration, but not defeat. "I can't, Foggy."

"You just sang it a second ago!"

She heard Matt make one of those sounds, the low and quiet ones that typically came bundled up in a folded expression, but she didn't look up to get an eyeful. "Don't know, Foggy," he mumbled. He didn't enjoy being under scrutiny-- especially not the kind he was getting right now.

Foggy sighed. "It's okay, man. Don't be nervous."

"Not nerv-nervous." He sounded so goddamn young. And also nervous.

"What if I start, Matty? Let me start." If Karen's laugh sounded like a strangled cat, Foggy's singing voice sounded like a _dozen_ cats. In a blender. _"Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain, with the rain in Shambala..."_

Matt didn't miss a beat. _"Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame, with the rain in Shambala."_

It sounded _so fucking strange_ , but it made her heart leap in her chest with an almost-painful amount of force. She tried to identify the feeling that was causing it, but even with all the progress she'd made in her own head, she couldn't figure it out.

He kept going, and when he finished the first stanza, Foggy slowly and gently spoke up. "...How do you do that, Matty?"

"Do?"

"Sing. How do you sing?"

Karen finally lifted her head to see Matt staring at the floor with his face crumpled in confusion. Exactly how she'd imagined it in her mind. He reached up and tapped his fingers along his Adam's apple. "Um, here, Foggy."

"Don't be a smartass."

Matt huffed, and shoved a cracker in his mouth, lowering his head. "Don'know," he grumbled around the food.

Karen thought that she'd seen a documentary or something about speech disorders, but wasn't totally sure. For all she knew, it had been about birds and her mind was twisting it up to fuck with her, as it sometimes did. "Maybe..." she started, then stopped, scratching her chin.

"Maybe...?" Foggy echoed, looking at her, desperate for an answer.

"Maybe it's... an undamaged part of his brain? You know, where music comes from? Uh... the creative stuff?" She thought she might have read once that shit like music and art came from a separate area of the brain. She hoped she wasn't wrong.

"...That's actually... that kinda makes sense."

"I mean, he has a fucking awesome memory. Obviously it's scattered damage."

Matt blinked slowly at the floor and shoved another cracker in his mouth. "I am here," he grumbled, again around the food. Even Karen could translate it. _I'm sitting right here, assholes._

Foggy translated it, too. He winced. "Sorry, buddy."

"Not stupid, Foggy."

"Nobody said you were, Matt."

He swallowed and let out a rolling huff. "Don't know... I don't know why. Foggy. It, mm. Not." Matt's eyes rolled around in that half-panicked way they did; frustration was settling into his expression. Karen hated seeing it, but for a different reason than before. Some days were better than others when it came to him getting words out of his head. "A _lot_ more time. To talk. Not as much _time_ , sing," he said, slowly.

Foggy leaned against the counter. "Is it easier for you? Is that what you mean?"

"Yes." Matt was messing around with the cracker wrapper, empty now, and he hummed. "Mmm, mm. I like _it_ , Foggy."

"You like singing?"

A tiny smile started across Matt's face, finally chasing the frustration away. "Foggy, yes."

"Where's your CD player? Do you want to sing the rest of them?"

"I w--... I do want _to_. Foggy."

"Let's go, then."

The smile became a grin as Matt hopped down from the kitchen counter, tossing the cracker wrapper into the paper trash can. Karen watched them go, then grabbed a granola bar and made her way to the couch. The shotgun could wait. She sat down, watching as Matt produced the CD player, then checked the batteries, and twiddled his fingers nervously before finally turning it on.

Karen and Foggy listened as Matt sang _Delta Dawn_ beginning to end. Not a single pause or stammer inflected his voice. Foggy sat, silent, his chin in his hand and his fingers over his mouth, listening. By the chorus of _Leroy Brown_ his eyes were getting damp, and by the first stanza of _Tie a Yellow Ribbon_ , he was crying. Karen felt a warm tightness in her chest like she was halfway out of breath.

Matt stopped halfway through the song, carefully pausing the player.

"...Foggy, y--... _are_ you okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, buddy, I'm okay," Foggy answered, faintly. He sniffed a few times, then reached out and curled his hand around the back of Matt's neck for a hug-- a real one, not a forehead nudge, wrapping both arms around Matt's shoulders and crushing him close. It was such a tight embrace that Karen could almost feel it from over on the couch. Wait, no, that was still her chest. Damn.

Matt blinked slowly, confused and concerned, running his shaking hand on Foggy's arm. "Foggy, not okay."

"I'm fine. I'm great."

Matt hummed, and didn't call him on a lie, which he would have, if he'd heard it. Instead, he turned his head and buried his nose in Foggy's neck. Karen could barely hear what he mumbled against Foggy's skin. "I sing more, you want?"

"Definitely. Definitely, Matty."

He shifted again, resting his chin on Foggy's shoulder. "You, mm. More good," he sighed.

Foggy laughed at that, finally pulling away, and Matt snuck in a bump while Foggy was wiping his face. "You still think I'm a better singer, huh?"

"Hn. Yes." Matt thought for a second, then put the player aside, and held up both hands. "Foggy, good? Ten, high?"

The correction was instantaneous. "High _ten_." And of course, Foggy clapped his hands against Matt's. Both of them grinned. They lost thirty years of age between them.

Matt tilted his head in the direction of the couch. "Karen, you like?"

She almost jumped. Almost. "Y-yeah, Matt. Yeah, I like it."

"More?"

"Of course." It was one of the easiest choices she'd ever made in her life.

Matt grinned again, and was laughing as he brought the player back into in his hands. " _Shambala_ , Foggy. Sing with me."

He smiled, and he did.

Their routine began to include a lot more music.

\---

Karen sat on a bucket in the garage, staring at the sketchbook in her lap. There were hand-drawn schematics all over the pages for the spotlight she was building-- a near-identical copy of the two installed on top of the truck. She turned and dug into her toolbox, producing a handful of Allen wrenches, lining them up alongside the screws she was trying to get out of the light fixture, trying to find the correct size. There were quite a few parts missing that she'd have to scavenge, if it didn't rain tomorrow.

She heard footsteps on the stairs, but didn't look to see who it was, because she didn't have to. Light and graceful, barely making any noise at all.

"Hi, Matt."

"Hi, Ka _ren_."

Karen went through all the wrenches, and couldn't find the right size. Annoying. She looked up; he had the bow in his left hand, and as he got to the last stair, he clutched the rail and launched himself around the corner. Karen felt her mouth twist in reflexive worry-- a reaction she'd long stopped trying to douse. "...Is it lunchtime already?"

"Yes. Um. Soon. Foggy make."

"Makes," she said, lowering her gaze back to the sketchbook.

"Foggy makes."

"Makes what?"

He grunted, and she heard him moving a little closer to her, as if to see what she was doing. "Foggy, mm. Makes food." Humming, he moved to the storage area under the stairs. There was a soft scrape as he grabbed an empty water bucket, turned it upside-down, and sat on it beside her.

"Food for what?"

Another low grunt. "Eating."

Karen scoffed, then tossed the Allan wrenches back into the toolbox, turning her head toward him. He was sitting halfway in her direction, the bow in his hands, pulling on the string over and over. It really _was_ helping-- he was actually using his left hand now, instead of keeping it tucked up against his body. "You're funny, but you know I was trying to get you to say it right."

He rolled his eyes, kept pulling. "Hm. Foggy makes food. _For_ lunch. Karen." He grumbled for a second. It wasn't often that she was the one pressuring him to talk correctly. "Foggy makes food for lunch, Karen."

She should have corrected it to 'Foggy is making', but it was too late now, and besides, he'd made a hell of an attempt at a whole sentence. "What's he making?"

"Don't know. MREs."

"We're almost out of those," she said, leaning back toward the spotlight, making sure that the screws that were supposed to be in were nice and tight.

Matt hummed. "Know that. _Get_ more."

"MREs?"

"Hn, no. Food." He gestured to the garage door with the bow. "Rain soon. Not tom-- tomorrow. Maybe." Matt set the bow down carefully next to him and stuffed his hands in his hoodie pocket, chewing nervously on his lower lip.

She glanced over at him and frowned. "What's up?"

"Mm." He was fiddling his hands in the pocket, eyes flicking around the floor, then the truck's tires. "Um. Karen."

"Yeah?"

"I got, um... I found. Um." His eyebrows pushed toward each other and he angled his face at the ground. He tapped his good leg once, then huffed, as if in disappointment in himself, and pulled something out of the pocket that glinted in the light. Matt held his right hand out slowly, the object curled into his fingers. "Um. For you."

"For me?" Karen felt her eyebrows raise, but held her hand out. He dropped the thing into her palm and was gone in the next second, snatching up his bow and bounding up the stairs without another word. She stared after him, then turned the object over in her hand. A glittering silver chain with a dog whistle threaded onto the end.

Karen sat for a long time, just staring at it, turning it over with her finger. She heard the other two singing _Leroy Brown_ softly upstairs.

Gently, she pulled the chain over her head, letting the whistle hang against her chest, then stood up and climbed the stairs to the kitchen. Foggy caught a glance at her over the camp stove, then gave her a wide grin and a thumbs-up. On the counter, Matt twiddled his hoodie strings, and smiled hesitantly at the floor.

\---

The next day: rain. The day after: rain.

The third: overcast. Matt was gone all day. It wasn't unusual, especially after he'd been cooped up for any amount of time from the rain. Foggy worried about him eating, but since Matt usually brought back food, Karen assumed he ate on the go.

In the afternoon, a whistle pulled Karen out of her focus on the Braille book and translation page in her lap. She lifted her head, blinking, but Foggy was already on his feet, expression taut, going for his medical bag. He went to the window and opened it the rest of the way, leaning out and looking around.

"Matt?"

She heard a low voice from above Foggy-- he was on the roof. "Fog. Here."

Foggy twisted himself around to look up and became a slight shade paler. "Jesus, Matt." He leaned toward the ladder, rattled it gently. "Can you get to this? Do you need me to come up?" Shit.

Karen heard a vague 'hnn' sound, then the rattling of the ladder. She got up and crossed the living room in time for Foggy to help Matt through the window, then grab his upper arm so he didn't crash straight to the floor. There was blood on his face, dripping out of his nose. Scratches all over him. He smeared blood along the windowsill as he came over it, then dribbled more to the floor. There were already a lot of bloodstains on the carpet. This was not an uncommon occurrence.

"Sit down, buddy," Foggy said, keeping his hand on Matt's arm and easing him back onto the coffee table. Matt grunted, hugging his side with his shaking hand and reaching up to try to stem the blood dripping from his nose with the other. "Karen, can you--"

She was already there, reaching out to help pull the coat off Matt's shoulders. He brought up his hands to stop her, head jerking in a shake. "Karen, no. Bite. Bites. Get, mm." Matt waggled his hands awkwardly. "Gluh."

"It's _gloves_ , Matt," Foggy told him, and turned, digging around for the cardboard box inside his duffel bag. "Thanks for the warning, dude," he said, tossing Karen a pair, and pulling on a set himself. It was one thing to mingle with a feral-- the one feral that never even bit _other_ ferals, let alone one of his friends-- but it was another to clean out bites made from them. They were always careful. Karen assumed it was second nature to Foggy.

She pulled them on and went about carefully unwrapping the dust-stained, faded scarf that had been dyed back to its original color with blood. Jesus. One of his eyes was swollen and bloodshot, and as Karen got his torn hoodie off, she saw that there were a million fucking scratches all over every inch of his bare skin. There were punctures along his jaw, his arms, his shoulders-- yep, bites. They looked seriously painful.

"God," was her only observation. If it was a territory squabble, it'd been a goddamn bloodbath. Matt always gave as good as he got. And, yeah, his hands were stained past his wrists with blood that she didn't think was all his. "You sure you didn't get run over?"

"No _run_ over," Matt mumbled, eyes flicking around rapidly. Pain.

Foggy got the immediately-required supplies in his arms and turned. He dragged in a gasping breath and let it out as a sharp sigh. "Holy _shit_ , Matty."

"Feral," Matt grumbled, hissing and flinching his face away as Foggy tried to tilt his head to get a better look at his eye. Jaw tight, he puffed out a breath and moved his head back obediently so that Foggy could examine him. "Fe _rals_. Did not want. Me."

"No shit, really?" Sarcasm didn't really work in a conversation with Matt. Most of it went right over his head. Foggy sounded pretty pissed off, though. "I told you to stay out of their territory."

"I was-- was _not_ ," Matt huffed, dribbling more blood into his lap from his nose and a split lip. "They, um. They... in ours. Our territory." He winced as Foggy pressed his hands carefully around his swollen eye. "Made go away."

Foggy blasted out a hard breath, then turned and pawed through his medical supplies, producing the alcohol. "How many, man? They beat the fucking shit out of you. Christ." His hands were shaking.

"Hn, Foggy." Matt was wincing as soon as the alcohol was open, but kept himself still as Foggy started cleaning out the scratches and bites. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight. Eight."

"Eight fucking ferals. You went up against that many. You're a dumbshit." Foggy sank back on his haunches. "Your nose is still bleeding." He rolled up a few gauze pads, and stuck them in Matt's good hand. "Here, stick these up there," he ordered.

"Yes." He did it, grumbling.

Karen spoke up. "Eight ferals, Matt. Is that the whole pack?" Their unruly neighbors that Matt had spent two weeks beating the hell out of his slice of Brooklyn. And another two weeks to _keep_ them out.

"No. Twenty-two, all."

"Were they from the pack?"

"Yes, familiar."

Foggy grunted and rolled his eyes. "Why didn't you run?"

Matt's answer was obvious. "In territory."

"I don't give a fuck, dude."

" _I_ give fuck. _My_ territory," Matt growled, forceful. "Foggy's territory. _Karen's_." He bit down on his tongue as the rough gauze and alcohol swiped into a deeper scratch along his collarbone. "They do not. Do not. Mine, Foggy, _mine_."

"Yeah, yeah."

Karen was still sitting next to him. "How far did they come in?"

His eyes darted around. "Ugh. Ten... ten block...s. Blocks in. North b... border."

"That many came that far?"

Matt's face was all twisted as Foggy went from bite to bite and scratch to scratch, cleaning them all with a mechanical focus. They'd all been through this before, but he hadn't come home this thrashed for a long time. What the fuck had he gotten himself into out there? "Karen, yes."

"Why?"

"I don't know this."

Karen hummed and sighed. It was rare enough that a single feral came wandering past Matt's borders, but the whole fucking _pack?_   They'd been smart about staying away from him. What had caused them to move in?

Foggy looked far beyond pissed now, but she knew he wouldn't admonish Matt for something he couldn't control. "Did they get you on the ground?"

"Yes."

"Jesus. How the fuck did they manage that?"

"Had a, hm. Had a..." Matt waved his arms around gracelessly, pulling his thumbs and forefingers into circles.

"Weapon? Stick?"

"Yes. Metal. It." Matt made another motion, drawing a curve in the air.

"Crowbar?"

"Yes. Think so." He shifted, tapped the fingers of his good hand on his shoulder. "Here. Hit a lot. Fell down." There was a gash there and a deep bruise already starting to color up underneath it. Jesus, how hard did they have to hit him to break the skin through two layers of clothing?

Foggy winced at it. "Ouch, dude."

"I am okay."

"No, you're not. Any breaks?"

"Foggy, no."

"Well, you've got that much going for you, lucky bastard. Tilt your chin back."

Matt complied, wincing. Some of the scratches were deep as hell. "They are not... hn. Not _allowed_ ," he growled again.

"Yeah, all right." Foggy danced the tips of his fingers over the swollen half of his face. "Is your eye okay in there? It's bloodshot."

"Is, it is, is it, is okay," he said, momentarily forgetting the order the words were supposed to go in. He rolled his eyes in irritation at himself. "It is okay."

"Your nose? Is it broken?"

"No."

"That's good. Did you kill any of them?"

"Yes. One, two, three." He didn't look proud of himself. He never did.

"Where's your curtain rod?"

Matt grumbled and gestured to the ceiling.

"The roof?"

"Yes."

"I got it." Karen was already getting to her feet and crossing the room, eager to actually have something to do. Foggy basically had the first aid covered. She climbed up onto the windowsill, squinting at the chill wind that blew up into her face. The ladder didn't go all the way to the top, but she was agile enough to get there. Matt climbed the last leg like it wasn't even there.

Grunting, she hauled herself up onto the roof, frowning at the drops of blood that had trailed over from the neighboring building. The curtain rod was leaning against the bastion there, blood on both ends, bits of what she assumed was skin and tufts of hair tangled in the curves. Yeah, it'd been a bloodbath. She bent over the bastion and grabbed it, then made to return to the ladder.

There were bundled clouds on the horizon, just over the river. Dark, massive, towering over the remains of the city like the city had never existed to begin with. Karen frowned and tapped the curtain rod on the edge of the roof to shake free the pieces Matt had torn out of the ferals, then leaned it on her shoulder and climbed back down.

Matt was making that strange growling-whine noise as he sat on the table, Foggy bent over behind him with suture in his hands.

"I think it's gonna rain again," she said as she stepped down onto the carpet, leaning the rod in the corner. "He got nailed that badly?"

"Yeah, probably the crowbar," Foggy said, curling the suture over the forceps with a practiced ease. "Why didn't you duck, man?"

"A lot feral. Ferals."

"I can't believe you didn't run."

Matt rolled his eyes again, expression tightening afterward from another pass of the needle. He never wanted pain relievers or anesthetics or anything, either. Karen knew why. She wished she didn't.

"Can't run," Matt grunted, then hissed, clenching his jaw for a moment. His eyes were flicking all over the place in agitation and pain. "They take."

"Do you _really_ need ten more blocks?"

"Yes."

Foggy sighed.

Karen went into the kitchen and grabbed a bowl, filling it with water from the purifier, grabbing a rag on her way out. As she walked back, she got a look at the gash-- not too bad. She'd seen worse. So had Matt's back. Road map.

"Here," she said, crouching down in front of him. "Can I clean the blood off you?"

Matt was blinking slowly at the window. "Yes."

He stayed still for her-- he always did, even if it had taken him weeks to stop shying away from her. She told him where she'd be touching him, like Foggy always did.

The water in the bowl was light pink and getting darker before she was done with his face. She tugged his knit cap off and his hair stuck up everywhere-- it'd grown a bit from the shitty cutting job she'd given him, but it was still uneven. Maybe in their previous life it'd been a haircut that someone would pay a ton of money for.

Without even thinking about it, she reached up and carded her fingers through his hair to get it to settle against his skull. She never touched him without warning, and knew before the action was over that she should have told him first. To her surprise, he didn't flinch away. Almost on reflex, he pushed back against her palm, eyelids fluttering slightly and the pain on his face relaxing by a degree. His skin was colder than her own, even through the gloves.

Apparently, he realized what he was doing at the exact same time she did, and pulled back liked he'd burned her, right when she tugged her hand away from his head as if she'd shocked him.

Foggy saw the whole thing and let out a strained laugh. "You guys are nerds."

Matt made a weak growl of irritation; Karen rolled her eyes.

She went back to cleaning him off, and let him dip his hands into the bowl of water to get the worst of the blood off of them. Jesus, he must have gone to fucking town. His knuckles were split, and his left hand was shaking harder than usual-- pain, probably. Pain, or spending more time than any of them were comfortable with in the vicinity of the creatures he was trying so hard not to be. Staring at the blood coming off his hands, turning the water from pink to red, she knew it was a task that he was only half-failing.

"There," Foggy said from behind him, snipping off the suture with his scissors. "All in one piece again."

"Didn't lose."

"Yeah, well, when you do lose something, I'll beat you with it. You need to be more careful." Foggy put his tools into a plastic cup so he could take them to the sink and clean them later. He always cleaned them. "No more fights with half a fucking pack, okay, dude?"

Matt sighed. "Okay."

\---

Three days later, Karen was down in the garage, fiddling with the spotlight some more, when a _thump_ in the ceiling above her and a low yowl echoing down the stairs grabbed her attention. She put her tools aside and hurried up to the apartment. She wasn't even halfway up there before she heard Foggy bitching in the living room.

"Jesus, Matt, _again?"_

"Foggy, hurts."

"Yeah, I bet it fucking does!"

Karen stepped into the living room and found Matt on the floor, bleeding, and Foggy bent over next to him, getting him back to his feet. Blood across half his face, hand shuddering and tucked up hard against his stomach. He looked _angry_. She nearly gave pause halfway through the living room when she caught sight of it.

Thankfully, Foggy looked a lot angrier. "God, Matt. _God_."

He'd limped back home with a broken finger, a cracked rib, a split cheek, and a glowering glare of total goddamn disappointment. The curtain rod had more pieces of ferals stuck to it, and his coat was nearly in tatters.

Foggy was, to use frank and precise terms, pissed the fuck off about it.

"We just talked about this _three days ago_ , Matt!"

"Foggy, I know." His voice was dead. He didn't care. There was something else bothering him. Fiddling with the edge of his hoodie in his lap as Foggy cleaned out an additional million scratches and bites on his back, he glared at the floor and stayed quiet.

Karen caught it, and of course she had to ask. "What happened, Matt?"

He tilted his head halfway in her direction, then lowered it, as if ashamed. "They took."

"Took what?"

"Territory," he sighed.

Foggy echoed Matt's sigh with a sharp huff of his own. "You've got fucking _miles_ of territory, Matt. You can stand to lose a few blocks."

Matt mumbled incomprehensibly.

"You need to speak clearly."

A long-suffering groan. "Safe. Safe... _for_ you, safe for... for Karen," he managed, continuing to glare at the floor. "I don't want them."

"I know you don't want them. But you're one man fighting off twenty-plus of those assholes. You're not invincible, Matt."

"Invincible, what is this?"

"Means you can't get hurt."

Matt lifted his shaking arm as if to show them where his ring finger was swollen. It was hard to miss. "Can get hurt."

"That's what I'm saying." Foggy finished on his back, then moved around to his front. He let out another sigh. He sounded so tired. "God, what hit you in the face?"

"Mm. Wood."

"Oh, wonderful. Splinters?"

Matt looked very small and very uncomfortable. "Yes."

"Great." Foggy dug out his tweezers. "This is gonna take a while, Matt. You gotta go to the bathroom or anything first?"

"No," Matt said, faintly.

"Okay. Let's go on the futon, then. Lie down."

Karen watched as Matt picked himself up off the table and flopped down on the futon like a felled tree. Foggy followed, digging out his penlight and turning it on. He bent down and started shining it into the gash in his cheek.

"Can I help?" Karen asked.

"Yeah. Can you get some stitches ready?"

"...Yeah." He'd taught her a while back. Foggy had certainly shown her a lot of shit, because he _knew_ a lot of shit. Mostly from books, too, as far as she could tell. And hands-on experience. A week of treating the crap that Matt got himself into was probably an equivalent to four years of medical school.

Matt was gazing fixed in the general direction of Foggy's shoulder, lips drawn into a tight line. She knew how much he hated this shit, but she knew how much he hated losing ground to the ferals even more. He hadn't lost any in a long time.

"Your fucking head, man," Foggy hissed, jerking the tweezers away every time Matt twitched. "I can't grab 'em."

"...Sorry, Foggy." His voice was barely above a whisper.

"It's not your fault, Matt." He paused, and sighed. "I'm not mad, okay? Is that what you think? That I'm mad?"

Matt didn't speak, and started fiddling at the corner of a nearby blanket with jerky, distraught movements of his right fingers. His left hand he kept close to his stomach.

At Matt's silence, Foggy frowned, and sat back on the futon. "Talk to me, Matty. What's the matter?"

His jaw jumped; his eyes darted. "Don't want to lose."

"Lose what?"

"Territory."

"It's just territory, Matt. We don't need all that space up there anyway."

Matt huffed. "Do _need_. Keep it safe. Keep _you_ safe."

"We've been just fine for a few months now, buddy." Foggy shifted a little closer, setting the tweezers aside and lifting Matt's hand to examine his finger while they talked. "How 'bout this? If they get much further in, we'll help you, okay? We'll help you b--"

"No! No, Foggy. Not safe," Matt said, as quickly as he could. "Not good. You, mm, get hurt. Don't want you. To get hurt."

"It's not okay for you to come home beat to shit like this all the time."

"Know that. Nng." He winced as Foggy started wrapping his injured finger around the neighboring one. At least it was the hand that didn't work worth a damn. "A lot, Foggy. There are a lot. Not safe."

"But it's okay for you to go fuck around with them? Alone?"

"Ye-- _ah_ , Fog, stop--"

"I have to tape it," Foggy said, that sharp edge moving into the tone of his voice. Karen had heard it before, but not since Matt's accidental swim in the Hudson. The tone that Matt always listened to, always snapped to attention for.

Just like the other times, Matt froze up immediately. He kept himself as still as he could, pressing his lips together, eyes flicking up to the ceiling and staying there. There was some vague emotion flickering on his face, but it was hard to see what it could be past the disappointment layered all over the top.

"Sorry, dude. It'll just take a minute." He didn't really sound sorry-- he was too irritated for that-- but, true to his word, it barely took forty seconds before he was done, ripping off the tape and setting the extra into his medical bag. "There. I'll have to find a splint later." When Matt didn't respond, he let out another sigh, dragging his hand down his face. "I'm not mad."

The reply was soft and afraid. "...You lie."

"Matt..." he huffed out a breath that was heavier than a sigh but too light to be a groan. "Okay, I'm mad." Karen saw Matt flinch. "But it's not about you. It's about..." he waved an arm at the window, "...them. The situation. You know I hate having to fix you all the time."

"...Foggy, yes."

"I hate seeing you hurt. In pain. It hurts me when you hurt. I know you understand that."

Matt blinked slowly. There was still disappointment all over his face. "Yes."

Foggy rubbed Matt's shoulder and he leaned toward it, like he always did. "You put yourself in too much danger, Matty. You remember when I told you to take care of yourself?"

Karen had never heard about it, so it must have been a conversation they'd had when she wasn't around. Or wasn't listening, because she was treating Foggy's best friend like a deranged monster when he was anything but. She chewed on the inside of her cheek and tried not to think about it, but the act of letting her emotions run rampant in her head also allowed memories to skip hand-in-hand with them. A congealed mess of images and sounds.

It was okay. She could sort through it. She was getting better.

"I remember, Foggy."

"You're not doing it, Matt. You're not taking care of yourself. You are so much more important than the territory you take. You understand?"

Matt grunted and turned his face away.

Foggy sighed. "Don't give me that shit, Matt. You're important, and we need you here, so suck it up and try to stick around with us for a while, okay?"

"...Okay."

"Okay. Now hold still, I need to get those fucking splinters out of your face." He leaned forward, sticking the penlight in his mouth.

It took a long time, because of that harsh, random twitch he had. Karen watched, holding the suture still in her hands, finding herself a bystander to the unique and incredible relationship that sat on the futon in front of her, and found, also, that she couldn't look away. She fiddled with the dog whistle that still hung there, between two layers of clothing, against her chest.

She was struck breathless by the sudden and too-truthful fact that she would never know anything like it, herself. One soul, two bodies, she thought, an odd observation that flew out of nowhere from the part of her mind that she still couldn't reach. _He's mine, I'm his_. A strange feeling was building up in her gut that tried to come out as noise, but she didn't know if it was going to be a sob or a laugh or something that was both at the same time. Karen clamped down on it, letting out a half-sigh, and waited.

Foggy had graduated from simply pressing down on Matt's shoulder, to tangling his fingers in the other man's hair, to gently but firmly grasping Matt's jaw to try to keep his head still. Matt didn't fight it. He blinked slowly at the wall and idly ran a fingertip over the tape wrapped around his shaking hand.

"Goddamn, there," Foggy said, wiping what looked like the twentieth splinter off on a piece of gauze he'd lain on Matt's chest. He took the penlight out from between his lips with his pinky and ring finger, careful not to contaminate the tweezers with it. His attention to detail was fucking astounding. "I think I got them all. Did I get them all?"

"Hn." Matt's eyebrows scrunched up slightly. "Yes."

"Cool." Foggy turned to the side, where Karen still was, so suddenly that she jumped.  "Whoa. Sorry." His eyes searched her face for a few too-long seconds. "Jeez. Are you okay?"

"Huh? Yeah, I'm..."

He leaned over and carefully plucked the suture from her hands. "Thanks. You, uh." Foggy gestured at his face.

Karen blinked, then reached up to her own, feeling dampness there. When she touched it, she jumped harder than she had when Foggy turned to her. "Oh. Jesus," she breathed, half in embarrassment, wiping her face. "Sorry." She hadn't even felt them, too concerned about the feeling twisting up her insides that she was still failing to figure out.

"Don't apologize," Foggy said, threading the suture through one of his curved needles. He paused and tossed her his penlight. "Can you shine that on his face for me?"

"Yeah," she said, glad to have something else to do that wasn't staring endlessly like they were a fucking peep-show. At least one of them was blind.

Foggy just saw way too much for his own good. "Don't flinch, Matt, I'm putting your stupid face back together."

"Not--"

"Shh, don't talk, Jesus. I have a needle in my hand."

Matt made a grumbling growl instead, and kept himself as still as he could, Foggy adjusting his grip on his jaw and digging in with the needle with a graceful, practiced ease. Even with the twitch, Foggy was still kicking ass. Matt didn't flinch or pull away, but his eyebrows crumpled whenever the needle went in and he was making quiet noises in the back of his throat. 

It took him a lot less time than it had to get the splinters out, while Karen pointed the light and wondered what it felt like to get hit so hard with a piece of wood that it embedded pieces of it into one's skin. Matt's face was bruising, and it was going to look awful, but he'd definitely looked worse. She thought back to the knee injury, and how pale and sickly he'd been, and wondered how close he'd actually come to dying of infection. And how close he'd come to dying of an overdose when she'd nailed him with that tranquilizer dart.

Guilt was a new emotion for her. She hated it.

Foggy sat back with a sigh, putting his tools back into the battered plastic cup, just like the last time. "There. Only four this time. It might scar."

Matt grumbled noncommittally.

Foggy just sighed again, giving up on trying to pry clearer words out of him. He looked tired, and angry, and more than a little overwhelmed. "All right. Just rest, dude." Gathering up his things, he got up and moved into the kitchen. His leg still hitched up on him from time to time.

Sitting on the coffee table, Karen brought her hands into her lap, watching as Matt rolled onto his side and tucked himself up into a ball with a rumbling, outward breath. She couldn't even call it a sigh, because it sounded like a slow-motion growl. It probably was.

"House arrest, Matty," Foggy called from the kitchen, his tools clattering into the sink. "Three days."

Karen was expecting a pained groan, far more loud and dramatic than any sound he'd made while being patched up, but there was nothing. She knew that something was wrong when Matt just made that rumbling sigh again, and pulled a blanket over himself, falling quiet.

She opened her mouth to say something to him, but nothing came out.

\---

For the rest of the day, Matt lay curled on the futon, frowning softly. Every once in a while he'd tilt his head and start a low growl, only to douse it, sigh, and curl up tighter. He didn't talk much, and eventually fell asleep without even eating dinner. Karen knew that under normal circumstances, Foggy would attribute it to him pouting or moping, but it wasn't anything like that. She had an idea about what was wrong, and it wasn't something that either of them could help.

During dinner, Foggy sat and ate his instant soup and stared at the floor in bewildered disconcertment as Matt slept silently behind him, tucked into a ball.

But they slept, even without Foggy continuing the story of _Deep Space Nine_ , and in the morning Karen woke up at the usual time, and their routine started right over again. Mostly. Matt got up, drank the cider she'd made for him, and then went and sat next to the window, silent. He didn't try to leave, didn't even open it up, just leaned against the wall, fiddling idly with the edge of the tape on his fingers.

Foggy found her late in the morning, while she was in the garage.

"I think there's something going on with Matt," he said, softly, although they both knew Matt could hear him if he was paying enough attention. He wasn't.

She stilled her hands on the spotlight. The last time a conversation had started like that, she'd ended up holding the guy's jaw open while Foggy flushed a goddamn half-gallon of pus out of his mouth. Staring at him over the top of the light's frame, she frowned. "What do you mean?"

Foggy sighed, rubbed his face. "He's still sitting by the window. Listening. It's like he's half-asleep. Hypnotized, or something."

Karen went back to the light, trying to take the frame apart so she could install the bulb she'd gotten from an abandoned vehicle down the street. "You know what it is, Foggy."

"Do I?"

"Yes. He's feral."

He scoffed. "Oh, really? How long have you been sitting on _that_ information?"

"I'm not joking around, Foggy. That's what he is. He hears the others outside. He knows they're out there. In his territory. It's the virus. Instinct, or whatever." She wiped her face. "It's probably not something he has control over. Something the virus stuck in him, like the shaking. The aphasia."

Foggy's eyebrows were crumpled; he stared at the floor as he mulled over the new information. "But he... he's different from them."

She nodded, remembering their conversation from a while back, when Matt had chased the first feral out of his territory instead of killing it where it lay. "That's true, but... he's still one of them. There's still a big part of him that's feral, Foggy, you know that. They're animals, bottom line. They took his territory, and he wants it back." Karen started putting her tools away; no way was she going to be able to concentrate with this conversation floating in the air. "And you told him to stay, so that's what he's doing, but that doesn't stop him from wanting to take back his shit."

He looked a little shattered, a little sad. Maybe a little appreciative, toward her, because she'd figured it out when he couldn't. For once, her utter hatred of everything that they were, and her knowledge of their social structure that she'd only kept in order to kill more of them-- all of it had actually been useful.

Foggy rubbed his face, frowning. "How do I help him, Karen?"

"I don't know. You're the expert."

"I'm not an expert on ferals. Just on Matt."

"And that's who we're talking about, isn't it? Do what you'd normally do. Distract him. Do something with him. He's probably bored as hell, hasn't got anything else to focus on."

"I tried talking to him, but he isn't interested."

"Did you try food?"

"Yeah."

"Nothing?"

"Well, he ate. Didn't seem to really notice he was eating. I managed to peel him off of the wall and get him on the couch, but... I don't know. I don't know what to do." He looked bewildered and lost. It reminded her of when they'd first met back at the shelter, his devastated voice when he'd told her Matt was dead.

Karen thought for a minute, then got to her feet. The dog whistle bounced against her chest between her t-shirt and her sweater. She reached up to touch it, to make sure it was there, then rubbed her face and made for the stairs.

"What are you doing?" Foggy asked, climbing up after her.

"I'm not sure," she answered, truthfully. "I... I want to help."

"...Okay. I'm not sure what you can do that I haven't, but... fuck. Anything to get him out of this weird fucking... whatever he's in."

Karen opened the door and stepped through the kitchen. Matt was curled up on the couch, against the same armrest they'd draped him over a few weeks ago in order to yank a tooth out of his mouth. A soft frown was etched into his face, his hands uncharacteristically still in his lap. The bruise underneath the sutures had bloomed purple and black across half his face. His eyes were fixed to a single point and she knew that meant he was listening to something.

She'd spent an unfair amount of time observing the both of them. Matt, especially, ever since he'd pinned her to the floor in the shelter and put a knife to her throat. It was to keep herself safe, she'd thought, to try to predict what he'd do in case he tried to kill her again. Even when it became clear he would never lay a hand on her, she'd still observed. She wasn't ready to admit to herself why.

Still, she sat on the edge of the futon, across from him, and spoke softly. "Hi, Matt."  
He didn't respond to her, or to Foggy, who sat carefully next to him.

"Matt?" she asked, a little louder. Still nothing. Karen raised her voice. " _Matt_."

He jolted slightly, blinked once, turned his face marginally in her direction. "Mh?"

"I'm talking to you."

"Mh." Instead of attempting conversation or doing anything that was vaguely like himself, Matt started staring at the floor with that odd fixed gaze. It looked strange as hell, because his eyes were always jerking around all over the place, like an involuntary action. Like the twitching.

Foggy shook him slightly, and talked into his ear, "Come back to me, buddy," and Matt jerked and blinked a few times, eyes flitting around the room.

He was breaking Matt's concentration, she realized. Matt was listening so hard to the ferals outside, running rampant in his territory, that he couldn't pay attention to anything else. Karen was reminded of the shelter, when he was pinpointing the aliens, and how Foggy had shaken him then, too, as if to drag him back to their world instead of the one he kept submerging himself in.

"Don't focus on them, okay?" Foggy asked, his smile turning weak and soft. "Just focus on us, in this apartment. They don't matter."

Matt grunted, tried to say something, didn't get any sounds out. His head tilted again; his eyes went still again. Foggy looked at her, then gestured to him, as if to show her that this was what he was worried about. He didn't have to. It was obvious.

"No, Matt," Foggy whispered, again dragging his friend out of the strange trance that he kept falling into. "Right here, Matty. Stay here with us. Can you do that? Stay in the apartment?"

"Mm."

"Here." Foggy took Matt's uninjured hand and placed it on his own chest, over his heart. Matt half-turned toward him, focus shifting. "Just concentrate on me, okay? Concentrate on my heart. Don't go back out there, can you do that for us? Stay here."

Matt turned his head back toward the window. He wasn't paying attention.

Karen finally dared to talk. "What's wrong with him?"

Foggy shook his head slightly. He was starting to look a little panicked. "I have no idea. It's like he can't focus. You... you saw him at the shelter, when he was searching. Like that, but he can't..." he trailed off, shook his head again, wrapped his fingers around Matt's shoulders and jostled him a bit harder. "Matty."

"Hunh?" Matt blinked again, turned his face toward Foggy.

"What's the matter with you, dude? You're freaking me out. You gotta stop doing that."

"Stop doing that," Matt repeated, dully, and checked out again.

"Jesus. Hey. Hey, hey." Foggy shook him harder, waited for his focus to return. "Pay attention. Matt, pay attention. Stop listening to them, all right? Hey, no, focus, you need to-- damn it, Matt."

Karen felt something gnawing heavily at her gut. Worry, anxiety. It wrapped itself around her torso and squeezed. She got up from the futon and sat on the coffee table, watching Foggy snap his fingers in Matt's face. It wasn't working. Foggy started breathing a little harder.

"Matt," he spoke, sharply, the tone of voice that always got an obedient response. It worked this time, too, as the other man huffed softly and turned his face back again. Foggy spoke fast and harsh, trying to get to him. "Stop this, Matt. Stop. Pay attention to me. Okay? Pay attention."

"Yes, Foggy," Matt said, his voice and his words sounding exhausted and hollow.

"You here with me now?"

"Hm. Attention, pay."

"It's the other way arou-- forget it. Matty, I need to you talk to me, all right? I need you to listen to _me_. Not them, not whatever's outside. Just focus on me. Me, this couch, this apartment, Karen. Okay? Hey, pay attention."

He went away again. Karen could tell; his head always tilted in one particular way and his whole body went still, save for the twitching in his head and left side. It looked absolutely maddening. Like someone changing the television channel the minute you started watching something.

Foggy shook his head again, blinked hard, wiped his face. "I don't know what to do, Karen," he breathed, looking over at her. "I've never seen this before."

"Do you think it's the virus?"

"No. Maybe. I don't know. He'd... he'd do this sometimes in his sleep, back at the shelter, but never like this. He always came back and stayed." Foggy shook his friend again but got no response. "I didn't think him losing ground would mess him up this much. Goddamn."

Out of nowhere, Matt mumbled what sounded like, "Seventeen," then lost focus on the two of them again.

Karen sighed. That must be his count. He'd killed five members of that fucking pack and they were still pushing inward. And now that he'd retreated, he'd submitted to them, and now they were only going to press in deeper and deeper. She started seriously considering grabbing the assault rifle and truck and just slaughtering them, the filthy animals that they were.

Then her mind told her that one of those filthy animals was sitting right in front of her, struggling to stay in his own goddamned head, and had to rub her face for a minute to get rid of the thought. Matt wasn't one of them, he was a man with extraordinary senses who was waging a war against the instinct that had been permanently instilled into his body. He'd done it for this long, so what had changed to make him lose his grip on it all?

The worry in her insides twisted and froze up. She rubbed her face, trying to come up with something, watching as Foggy got more and more agitated, more terrified, shaking Matt harder and rubbing dampness out of his eyes.

Karen dragged her hands down her cheeks, around to the back of her neck. The whistle chain twisted under her palms, and she let out a breath as her fingers followed it down to the whistle itself. She grabbed it without really thinking about it, pulling it from in between the layers of clothing and sticking it in her mouth. Not even hesitating, she blew into it.

Matt jumped about ten feet in the air and jerked his head around wildly, sucking in a sharp breath. "Whuh?" He seemed surprised and baffled to find himself on the couch with Foggy, eyebrows scrunching together, eyes flickering around.

"Matt," Foggy started, talking quickly to get his attention, already twisting his fingers into the short hair at the nape of his friend's neck. "Matt, can you hear me? You there?"

"Yes, Foggy," he answered, with a heartening alacrity. "Karen, too loud," he admonished in her direction, rubbing one of his ears.

"Sorry," she said, but she was concentrating more on how the pressure in her gut had finally started to loosen up. It looked like the whistle had worked-- he was far more present now than he'd been before. She let out a long, silent breath that felt like it'd been trapped in her throat her entire life, and twisted the object in her fingers. What the fuck had just happened to him?

Foggy kept his fingers in Matt's hair. "Dude, you were totally out of it for a while. Are you with us now? What the hell were you doing?"

"I..." Matt frowned at the floor. "Don't know, Foggy."

"How can you not know?"

"Was listen. Listening. A lot," Matt said, blinking harder when he realized his hand was still on Foggy's chest. His frown fell further. "Foggy. Worried."

"Yeah, no fucking shit, man. You scared the hell out of us."

"Am sorry."

"It's... don't worry about it. Listen to me, though, I'm serious. You weren't talking or anything. What the fuck _was_ that, Matt?"

His head twitched, jerked in a harsh shake. "Don't know. Listening." He finally took his hand away from Foggy's chest and used it to rub his own face, like he was trying to wake himself up. In a way, Karen supposed he was. "Foggy. I hear."

"What did you hear? The ferals?"

"Yes. Not only." Matt bobbed his head from side-to-side as he considered the words, pulled them carefully out of his head. "Air. Air moves."

Foggy frowned, paused to figure it out. "...Wind? You mean wind?"

"Yes. Cold. A lot wind, a lot... mm. W-water. Fast."

"A storm. You mean a storm, Matty? You could hear a storm coming?"

Matt seemed unsure, but went to fidgeting with the tape on his other hand, which even Karen knew was a good sign. "Storm coming."

"A bad one?"

"Don't know."

Foggy sighed and finally removed his fingers from Matt's hair, rubbing a hand on his  upper arm instead. "The ferals, too? Could you hear them?"

Matt growled. The sound poured anger into his soft voice, turned it into something dark and sharp and frightening. "Yes. In territory. Foggy, I don't want this."

"Oh, trust me, I know you don't." He seemed to think for a long couple of minutes, then, "When you're healed up, we're going out with you. All right? We'll take the truck. Those fuckers aren't gonna know what hit them."

Karen wanted to smile. She'd be glad to go out and help, she thought, and felt her thoughts stutter as the realization came that she was more eager to keep Matt safe than she was to slaughter a pack of ferals. Her stomach turned; the anxiety drew away and came back as something different, an echo of what she'd felt listening to him sing, and she fought to figure out what it was.

Matt was shaking his head in sharp twitches. "Foggy, no. Not safe."

"I know it's not. That's why we're going to come and _keep you safe_."

Karen spoke up, too, and Matt blinked in surprise, his growl fading. "You got me that awesome gun, and you don't want me to use it to clean out our territory? Why'd you get it for me, then?"

She saw Foggy smile. _Our territory_ , indeed.

Matt was still fighting it. A losing battle. "It is not safe," he attempted again, but Karen knew with the weak quality of his words that he was aware that he wasn't going to win this argument. He sighed, sagged a little. "Ugh," he huffed.

"It'll be great. You can bean them in their heads with your rod from the tailbed. Like mailboxes."

"Mailboxes, what is this?"

"A box. For mail."

Matt tilted his head. "Not female? Why?"

Foggy laughed, loud and sudden and honest, and Karen choked on her own spit. "No, dude, _mail_. It's a different word that sounds the same. Like bitter and better. Mail is... it's like small books that get sent to you. From other places and other people."

"Words a lot too much," Matt grumbled, nonsensical.

"Yeah. Way too much," Foggy said, giving no clarity to the nonsense, and he looked like Foggy again when he smiled and reached out to mess up Matt's hair.

He leaned into the touch and sighed. "Foggy. Tired."

"I can imagine. That shit always wears you out."

"That shit?"

"The... hyper-focusing you do. Your listening. You know. A lot listening."

Matt hummed. "It is... mm. Not stop. I not stop."

"You couldn't stop yourself doing it?"

He looked worried. "No. Couldn't stop."

"...I know you couldn't. Just like I can't stop myself from worrying about you. Constantly. A lot."

Matt huffed, then pitched forward and flopped right down on Foggy's lap. Foggy jerked, apparently to avoid getting head-butted in the balls. Matt spoke into his legs. "Sleep. I want to."

"Yeah. You need to eat something first, though."

"Mgh."

"And stop grunting. God."

"Not grunting," Matt grunted.

"Uh-huh. Come on. I'll make lunch. And you need to sing some more. Keep you focused. Okay?"

It was _Delta Dawn_ , that time.

\---

A low noise grabbed Karen's attention as she sat that evening with the Braille translator on the couch, and she looked up, blinking. Matt was asleep, stretched out underneath a tangle of blankets, Foggy next to him studying a book on surgical procedures. He looked up just as Karen did, and they shared a millisecond of eye contact before he was turning his head to find the source.

The noise came again, and she realized, belatedly, that it was coming from the direction of the windows. It was starting to get dark outside, probably the storm Matt had spoken of, but she got to her feet to look anyway.

Karen peered out the windows and saw clouds swirling in the air, coal-black and bubbling violently, faster than she'd ever seen a cloud move before. Curling through the air like smoke hurried along by wind. "Holy shit," she said. "This doesn't look good, Foggy."

There was the anxiety again, reaching up and squeezing itself into the space between her lungs. The clouds moved in with an unnatural speed, like an animal all its own, drifting in close, starved and furious. The sunlight that had only been veiled throughout the day became doused, ushering darkness into the apartment.

Foggy cursed softly, and she heard him fumbling, then a click, and there was a light next to the futon. His little penlight, weak but working. "What the fuck?" he breathed.

"I don't know," she answered, just as quietly.

On the futon, Matt lifted himself up, and started growling.

Foggy was talking, but the penlight was only illuminating the coffee table and she could barely make out either of them. "Matty, it's okay. Snap out of it."

Karen tried to keep her heart from beating out of her throat, but not because of the growl. It was an altogether different creature, this feeling of heavy and freezing dread. Her voice sounded strangled to her own ears. "Is he...?"

Foggy grunted, and she could just barely make him out, twisting his fingers in Matt's hair. "Yeah. He does this shit in his sleep sometimes, too. Did it at the shelter."

"How far out can--"

"Far," Foggy said, sitting up, shaking Matt slightly. "Buddy, hey, come back to us."

Karen felt around her chest for the whistle, and made to pull it out and use it, but then Matt flinched, sudden and hard like he'd been shot, with a soft sound that overtook his growl, his shaking hand pushing against Foggy's arm.

A split-second later, the sky exploded.

Thunder. So loud that it rattled the windows, shook the floor underneath Karen's feet, vibrated harsh in her throat. It took her a few seconds to realize that it was thunder, and not a goddamn explosion, but by the time that revelation had passed, she was panting in a half-panic and Matt was hyperventilating.

"Jesus--" Foggy managed, and Matt let out a high, pained whine as the thunder cracked again, deafening, leaving Karen's ears ringing. "Shh, shit, Matty, it's okay," she heard Foggy say, beneath the whistling the thunder had left in her eardrums. He tossed the penlight onto the coffee table and she could see him grab Matt's head, pressing his palms hard against his ears, and Matt covered Foggy's hands with his own. He pushed himself forward, face tight with pain, nudging their foreheads together.

"Hurts," she heard him say, his voice a low, tortured whine. His hearing. Oh, God.

The thunder rolled next, instead of exploding, and it sounded like it was right above them. Jesus, it sounded like it was _in the fucking living room with them_ , a physical force, gathering them all up into a frightened clump. Karen broken away from it, and moved to the window, listening to Matt whimper and Foggy shush him.

A rattling noise caught her attention, and she stared out the window and watched in silence as the hail started. At least she _thought_ it was hail. The hailstones weren't large but they were _fucking everywhere_.

It cascaded out of the sky in thick sheets, making its way up from the direction of the river until it was pouring all around the apartment. Rattling like an ocean of automatic gun fire. It pounded against the windows, a harsh constant hiss, all of it a cacophony of awful noise. It was still dark out, everything obscured, the clouds thick and black and _everywhere_. She couldn't see shit. It was like an artificial night had fallen.

The water was already pooling in the streets. Karen pressed her hand against the window, feeling the chill of the air outside. Matt made a sharp noise; the thunder cracked again, _boom-boom-boom_ , _boom-boom_ , all around them, explosions in the air.

"Shh, Matty, shh, I know, I know," Foggy was murmuring.

"Jesus Christ, what _is_ this?" Karen asked, backing away from the window because she was terrified the wind would shatter the glass and send it flying like shrapnel through the apartment. The backs of her knees hit the futon and she sat, her elbow bumping someone but neither taking notice.

Thunder again, and Matt was crying in low and gasping sobs. "It hurts, it hurts, it hurts," he kept whispering, and Foggy kept whispering back, but she couldn't hear what it was and nothing was going to make it any better anyway.

Karen had never heard anything in her life that was as loud as the thunder. She shifted backwards on the futon, her back touching someone else's-- shivering and twitching and panting rapidly. Matt. If the storm hadn't been taking her attention, she might have flinched.

Instead, she turned and reached out and touched him, her hand on his back, and started rubbing in soft circles. She'd never really done it of her own accord before, and had no clue what she was doing or why she was doing it. It didn't fucking matter. She was scared, he was terrified, they were all trapped and panicking in the deafening noise that had closed around them like a prison. "It's okay," she heard herself tell him. "It's okay. It's okay."

The whole apartment shuddered like they were in an earthquake at the next crack of thunder, and she was sure that Matt screamed, but it was lost to the roar of the storm. She leaned in close, and then they were all in a tight bundle together, Matt pushed up into Foggy's lap and Karen against Matt's back, all of them shivering and terrified and lost.

Then, light. Outside the windows, blazing blue and green, like a million strobe lights going off at once. Lightning. Karen caught a glance of it, arcing across the sky, a spiderweb of brilliant blue and yellow light, then flinched away, pushing closer to the others, her heart a silent howl in her head. Thunder again, and something shattered _somewhere_ , a soft tinkling bell in comparison to the furious sky above them.

Everything was shaking, rattling. The fucking apartment was going to collapse, she realized suddenly. It was going to collapse and kill all of them.

"We need to move," she said, but they couldn't hear her, and she couldn't even hear herself. Karen reached over Matt and her fingers fumbled across Foggy's face, the rough texture of his beard. She raised her voice to a shout and only heard a whisper. "We need to get downstairs!"

But she had Foggy's attention, at least-- the lightning went off again and she saw his face in snapshots of fear and panic. Their eyes met, for just a second, and she remembered a rear-view mirror, and an entirely different sort of fear, nothing like what she was feeling right in this moment.

"Downstairs!" she screamed again, as loud as she could, and still she barely heard herself. Hands shaking, she tugged at Foggy's shoulder, at one of Matt's arms, trying to get them up, to get them moving. "Downstairs!" she kept repeating, hoping that some semblance of quiet would fall for just a moment, just long enough so it could be heard.

Foggy was moving, though, pulling Matt with him, never removing his hands from the other man's head. Karen stood up, snatching the penlight from the coffee table. She felt the vibration of another clap of thunder instead of hearing it, and with a sudden icy wash of terror through her whole body, she realized she'd been struck deaf. She fought down the panic because she'd be no use to anyone if she gave into it, and grabbed Matt's arm, yanking them both upright.

Their whole world was random flashes of multicolored light and the horrific buzzing that filled Karen's ears until she could hear nothing else. It hurt, it burned like fire, and then she caught a look at Matt's face in a flicker of white and green and she knew she had never seen more agony than she had in that moment. It made her own pain a distant and terrible thing. She got her hands on them again, pushing them toward the kitchen, across the linoleum, then forcing herself around them to guide them down so they didn't slip on the stairs.

Her head was pounding hellfire in her ears, the backs of her eyes, but they were still moving, taking the stairs one at a time, and she knew she was still shouting but couldn't hear it, couldn't hear anything but the storm in her head and in their home.

They got to the garage floor, around the stairs, underneath to the storage area. This was the safest place, Karen thought. If the apartment collapsed above them, the stairs might stop the rubble from crushing them all to death.

Foggy crept backwards, Matt curled into him and heaving, Karen following behind with the penlight, all three of them tangled together in the darkness and praying for it to keep them safe. Here, everything seemed to rumble less, but all three of them were shaking so much more. She found herself pressed against Matt again, and he was pushing back, even now desperate for more contact, for a connection, for something that wouldn't hurt him so badly.

So Karen wrapped her arms around him, locked her hands over his chest, and stayed there.

The storm was a wild animal all around them, thrashing and roaring, and freezing wind was coming up from under the garage door, the low hiss of the hail and rain the only thing registering in her ears. Temporary, she kept screaming to herself in her head, it had to be temporary, her hearing would come back, it was just the noise of the storm shocking her system.

Matt smelled like their laundry soap and rubbing alcohol. Her face was in his hair, his twitch still present even now, flicking the strands across her nose and mouth. His breathing wasn't slowing down and she could feel each and every one shuddering out of him, chest expanding and contracting even with the cracked rib. She could feel Foggy's chest against the backs of her hands. He was breathing hard, and she could feel vibrations from his voice as he continued to speak those useless soothing words to nothing but air because nobody was listening.

There they stayed, a twisted congregation of pain and terror, for the longest hours Karen would ever experience in her life. None of them tried to move away, and nobody tried to talk. Matt's breathing eventually slowed somewhat-- he kept going limp at random intervals and Karen wondered if he was hyperventilating to the point of unconsciousness. It happened over and over. And every time he came back, stiff and panting against her chest, he jerked and she could feel the vibration of his voice as he cried out, screamed, howled. A terrified animal, pushed into a corner, just like her and Foggy.

But the storm ebbed in degrees, and the shaking around them started to fade, slow as anything. The apartment didn't collapse and the storm didn't rush in under the garage door and drag them screaming into the void. After a while, everything was still, and Karen's ears were ringing but she could hear someone breathing rapidly in time with the shoulders she had buried her face into.

Something touched her shoulder and she jerked like she'd been electrified, lifting her head, removing her arms from around Matt, falling back on her ass and sucking in a deep, icy breath. The penlight was laying next to her, somehow still operational; she picked it up and pointed it in front of her.

It was Foggy, of course, and he had his hand raised in a sort of peaceful gesture, an unsaid apology on his face. He talked, and she could hear him-- she could hear him, just barely, not more than a whisper. But she could hear him.

And he was Foggy, so his face was twisted up as he said, "That was the worst fucking shit." Matt was pushed up under his chin now, eyes screwed shut, Foggy's hands still layered under his own and over his ears.

Karen let out a shocked little scoff that she felt more than heard. She set the penlight on a nearby bucket so that the light bloomed weakly through the cramped space, and waved toward one of her own ears. "Can you hear anything?" she asked, and it sounded a little louder.

"Barely," he said, shifting around a little, pinning his tongue between his lips as he slowly pried his hands away from Matt's ears. Matt shuddered and pushed them back into place, shivering, and Karen could see bloodied scrapes where his fingernails had dug into the back of Foggy's hands. "Matty, it's okay, I think it's over," Foggy said, arms shaking at the effort of trying to get out from under Matt's grip.

She was moving before she could stop herself, ghosting one hand along Matt's arm before settling it on his back like before. Foggy blinked at her, the confusion and shock clear on his face even in the dim detail offered by the penlight.

He started a weak, "You don't gotta..."

"Yeah, shut up," she said, rubbing in circles like he always did, because it worked.

And it worked here, too, because the thrumming, tense wire Matt had become slowly started to slacken. She shushed him, and the vibration of felt strange against her lips without any real sound to give it form.

Eventually, Foggy was able to drop his hands from Matt's ears to his shoulders, although Matt kept clutching, kept pushing himself closer. When Foggy finally spoke, it was so far under a whisper that Karen didn't think she'd be able to hear it even without her ears ringing. The words weren't there, but whatever he was trying to convey was, and Matt slowly lifted his head and blinked open his eyes.

Foggy smiled, a broken and weak little thing. He talked again, and Karen leaned in closer just so she could hear it, so she could listen to something besides the hissing in her ears, the drumbeat of her heart in her head.

"Hey, buddy. Can you hear me?"

"...Yes," Matt breathed, then said, stronger, "I don't want it."

"No shit," Foggy said, trying to laugh, failing, then tugging him closer with one arm. He spoke into Matt's hair, shaking, all three of them shuddering with draining adrenaline and relief. "I've never seen anything like that, Matty. Jesus. I thought the sky was opening up again."

Karen still had her hand on Matt's back. She didn't remove it because she wanted to be closer. She wanted... she wanted...

Before she could move away or object, Foggy hooked his other arm around the back of her neck and pulled her against him, too, and suddenly she was inches away from Matt's face, and Foggy was repeating a soft, "We're okay, we're okay," and she swore she could hear the sobs trying to break out from underneath his voice.

They stayed like that for a while, just together, Karen clinging tightly to Foggy's sweater and staring at Matt, who just stayed where he was, blinking slowly, eyes roving around aimlessly. Every time one of them breathed, she could hear it a little more clearly, and she shut her eyes and listened.

She lay curled there for so long that she thought she might have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, there came the noise of wind rattling the garage door in total clarity behind her. It made her jump, which made everyone else jump, but nobody complained.

Karen felt the warm pooling of relief in her gut. Temporary. Like someone had fired a gun too close to her ears, that was all. She turned her head and her face was against Foggy's sweater, smearing dampness there.

"Easy," she heard him breathe. "My legs went to sleep."

Her eyes were open, but she couldn't see anything. He must have turned the penlight off. "How long have we been down here?" she asked, quietly. She could tell that Matt wasn't in front of her anymore, and was probably curled up against Foggy's side, too skittish to stay in her proximity.

"Couple hours. I think the storm passed, but... it's still really dark."

"Yeah, I see that."

She heard Matt grumble through a layer of clothing and Foggy's body. "Is far away. St-storm. Far." His voice was shaky, weak. Like he'd just crawled out of a war zone. For him, it was mostly true. "Foggy, cold."

"I know, it's fucking freezing down here." He shifted, jostling her, and she took the hint and picked herself up and away. Embarrassment tried to flood her mind when she realized she'd been straddling his leg and pushing her face into his chest the entire time.

Fumbling for the penlight, she found it, clicked it back on. "I can't believe this thing's still got power."

"I've had it for ages. I think it's immortal."

Karen slowly picked herself up, getting back to her feet. Her legs were sore and stiff, and her back was throbbing and her head and ears were ten times worse. She was alive, though, and that was something. A really big something.

As she turned to offer Foggy a hand, she watched Matt lift himself up, sharp and sudden, head tilting around rapidly, eyes tracking twice as fast, wide and afraid.

Foggy frowned and shook him slightly. "Matt?"

His eyebrows crumpled. He kept listening. His breathing was speeding up.

Foggy twisted a hand in his hair. "Matty."

A short jerk to attention, and Matt was blinking, pawing at Foggy's arm, aimless and desperate. "They come," he said, voice soft and low. "They come. Foggy. They come. Not good."

Foggy picked himself up, already moving, already on his feet and yanking Matt to his.

"They come. Not good. Need go away. Need go away, need go, need go." He grabbed Foggy's sleeve, yanked it hard. His voice rose from the usual quiet murmur to a loud, sharp bark. "Now. _Now_ , now, now, now, Foggy, now, not good, _now!"_

Everything was suddenly in motion, and Karen was dragged through its wake.

"Grab what you can," Foggy ordered. "Everything you can take. We need to get out of here."

Karen started to ask why, and stopped herself because she already had the answer, because it was pushing her toward the stairs with a shuddering, tremor-ridden hand, whimpering softly, urging her to hurry.

Foggy was upstairs first, gathering his medical supplies, Karen behind him, snatching their rifles, Matt grabbing his curtain rod, piling what food they had into his backpack. He was making sharp, distressed sounds in the back of his throat. It was dark as hell inside and Karen couldn't see much of anything, but she knew the feel of the guns, the weight of them, and that was enough.

Foggy was going for something else; Matt stopped him, dragged him toward the stairs.

"No more," he was saying. "No, no, no more, need go now, need go now." His words were half babble and all terror. "Truck, truck. Truck!"

Karen snatched the keys from the counter and led them downstairs, fumbling in the dark. Matt was all movement, slipping past her like a phantom, grabbing her hand as he bounded down the stairs and guiding it to the truck's door. "Inside," he barked, then turned to the garage door to get it open. "All, inside, now! Now, now!"

They followed his lead, did as asked, and Karen turned the truck on and the headlights flooded the garage with a sudden shock of light. Matt scrambled inside next to Foggy, breathing in sharp gasps, head tilting around, listening.

Foggy shook him as Karen backed out into the street. They were all breathing hard, now, each of them a different rhythm but all of them rapid with fear. "What's coming, Matt? What did you hear?"

He groaned in frustration, shaking his head with his whole body. "Sev-- seven. Teen. Seventeen, Foggy, seventeen."

"Seventeen _what?"_

Karen felt herself gasp more than she heard it, the blood thrumming in her ears overtaking the sound. In her head, everything clicked together with a harsh and damning finality.

"It's not seventeen ferals. It's not the pack." She shifted gear, not pausing to shut the garage door, pressing her foot into the gas pedal, tearing away from the apartment. "It's the aliens in the subway. They... it's..."

"Because it's dark," Foggy finished for her. "The storm. Oh, God." His voice was rough and hollow and it sounded like he'd been screaming for a year. "Oh, Jesus."

Matt whined again, took a sharp breath. "Now. Now. Close. They come." He turned his head, one hand pressed to the glass of the truck's window, and shuddered. "No, Fog, no. Not safe. Not safe."

As Karen turned onto the next street, there was a wail from behind them. And in front of them. And on either side of them. A cacophony, a chorus of disjointed voices, beeps and trills that pressed in on all sides, and Karen hadn't given thought to the idea that there could be a noise worse than the storm.

There was, and it was that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _No prayer, and no hell but the one we've made._  
>  _Let's cast off, turn tail._  
>  Murder by Death
> 
> \---
> 
> Matt's ability to sing is a real thing; it's called [melodic intonation.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melodic_intonation_therapy) He'll be a finalist on The Voice in no time.
> 
> The four songs on his CD, in order, are Delta Dawn by Helen Reddy, Bad Bad Leroy Brown by Jim Croce, Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree by Russell Brown, and Shambala by Three Dog Night. It is also [a real CD](http://www.allmusic.com/album/am-gold-1973-mw0001434485), released by Time Life in the nineties.


	20. machinehead

The truck's diesel engine roared in Foggy's ears as they crested a short incline and blasted down the other side, rain splattering in fat grey drops across the windshield, streaking sideways across the windows. While the truck roared, the aliens screamed, harsh and high-pitched, all around them. Foggy's chest hurt where his heart was beating a heavy percussion against his ribs, faster than it had been during the thunderstorm. At least then, the threat wasn't something that would rip doors off and tear them to pieces. At least then, he could _do something_.

Matt was breathing hard next to him, some sort of agony twisted across his face, but Foggy didn't know what was causing it, and didn't have time to find out, because Karen started barking orders next to him.

"Open the sunroof," was what she told him, leaning down to click on the spotlights. The truck hit something that crunched and jostled them all over the cab. The fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview fell to the floor. She didn't slow down. "Foggy," she said, sharp and loud, grabbing his attention. "Point one of them ahead of us and one of them behind us. Now. Get up there, now!"

He moved automatically, fingers scrabbling against the sunroof's glass before he found the latch, yanking it open. Roaring, icy wind poured into the truck, rain coming down in sheets and spattering across Foggy's face. _Skin infection_ , the back of his brain told him quietly, and he had to ignore it. He stood up straight on the truck's seat, air blowing against the back of his head, throwing his hair all over the place. The spotlights were both pointing forward; he grabbed one and swiveled it around, aiming above the tailbed. Everything around them was pitch-black, a void of hissing and wailing. Noises that echoed from every direction, bounced across the expanse of the city that was hiding in the darkness. Karen hit something in the street again and he planted his feet in the seat cushion, leaning and gripping the edge of the sunroof to stop from being thrown around. Out in the open, the truck's engine seemed so quiet compared to everything else, even as it bellowed when Karen slammed the gas pedal.

They whipped around a corner, the tail end of the truck skidding, the tires screeching as they struggled for purchase. Foggy just kept trying to breathe, feeling the rain slide down his face, his knowledge that it was going to start peeling layers of skin off only a dead siren in the very back of his mind. He kept his fingers gripped around the spotlight, keeping it pointed behind them, waiting for a flash of metallic skin to come into its perimeter, for an alien to leap forward at them from the dark.

From afar, there was lightning, the dead banner of the fading storm, and his eyes jerked over reflexively to look. Blue and green and fucking _purple_ , a multicolored spiderweb of alien light that reminded him far too much of the rift they'd torn into the sky, years ago. But in the light, he thought he saw their apartment, the familiar shape of the roof, and he _knew_ he saw aliens there, on that roof, all legs and claws and silver and mercury, and he had to blast out a breath of silent thanks to Matt for getting them the fuck out of there when he had.

Karen was yelling again and he shook his head, trying to concentrate on her voice. Everything was just so fucking _loud_. He kept his hands on the spotlight, and he couldn't hear her, couldn't hear a goddamn thing over the rain and the distant thunder and the sharp beeping wail that suddenly overtook everything as an alien came bursting from the dark like a creature out of an ocean trench, slipping into the light as it came down from a nearby building and leapt out into the street. He jerked back on reflex, his shoulders slamming into the edge of the sunroof, fingers fumbling over the spotlight as he tried to center it on the glittering plates he could barely see.

It squealed like the truck's tires, howled like a thousand sirens, and he could see its spindly legs as it bounded after them, slipping in and out of the light. Foggy cursed out loud, but heard very little of his own voice. The alien was so fucking fast, they all were, and he couldn't get the light centered on it.

Something cold tapped him on the leg and he jumped with a startled shout; when he brought one hand down, his fingers closed around the barrel of a gun. A rifle. Karen's, the big heavy thing that Matt had nearly died for.

She was screaming at the top of her lungs, voice shrill, but he could still barely hear her. "Fucking shoot it!"

Foggy still had one hand on the spotlight. He couldn't fucking do _both_ and he couldn't shoot the fucking thing if he couldn't _see it_ \--

There was movement in the truck and then Matt was climbing up beside him, holding the rifle, pressing it into Foggy's hands, then turning and grabbing one of the spotlights. He was still breathing hard, petrified, but he tried his best to look in Foggy's direction, to plaster bravery on his crumbling expression. It didn't reach his eyes; nothing ever did, and he only looked like a lost and frightened animal. He tightened his fingers onto the spotlight's frame, and didn't need to talk for his message to get across. _You shoot, I'll point_.

Foggy opened his mouth to say, "Get down, because this gun will fuck your ears up," but he only got through _Get_ before there was another shriek, layered in discordant beeping, and he turned away, because he had to, not because he wanted to, pressing the rifle to his shoulder, fumbling for the safety catch like Karen had shown him. Matt stayed next to him, hair blown in all directions, the bruise on his face as dark as the night around them, and tilted his head, trying to listen despite the rain and the movement of the truck jostling him everywhere.

Something crunched under the tires, and Karen was turning again. Where the fuck were they even going? Where could they even _go?_ Were they just driving in circles until the aliens eventually caught up and tore them to pieces?

Adrenaline thrummed through his body, right alongside his pounding heart. _Survive, survive_ , it hissed in his ears. Foggy gripped the rifle in frozen hands, listening to his friend panting at his side. He heard another wail to his right, turned toward it.

Matt blinked once and swung the light around in a graceful sweep, lighting up the alien as it leapt toward them, and it probably would have landed directly on the truck's roof if not for him. It made that sharp, high bleep of pain, and Matt flinched at the noise but didn't retreat. He kept his hands on the spotlight and the spotlight on the alien, using only his own ears to guide him-- his face was pointed down, eyes fixed on some phantom middle distance. Foggy felt the distant pain of the scrapes on the back of his hands where Matt's nails had dug in during the storm, and was grateful for them.

The alien wasn't going to give up, Foggy knew, not with the three of them packaged together in a vehicle. He blew out a breath, and re-gripped the rifle, and started following Matt's movements of the spotlight with the barrel of the gun, trusting his friend's ears more than his own eyes.

It worked. Two seconds later, the alien came at them again, screeching as it flew in from a nearby building and landed heavily in the tail-bed, the truck shuddering and fishtailing under its weight, its claws digging in for purchase.

Foggy was firing before it could twist around and get itself to them. He'd never fired a fucking machine gun before. The recoil was insane, sending the butt of the gun jackhammering into his collarbone, but he held on tight and didn't let go. The sound of it, though-- he knew it was loud, and started screaming apologies to Matt at the top of his lungs as he kept pulling the trigger, too afraid to tear his eyes away from the alien in the tailbed to check on him.

Foggy emptied half of the magazine in the damn thing before it stopped flailing around and stopped making those simultaneously awful and gratifying screeches of pain. There was blood everywhere, or whatever the aliens had that was equivalent to blood; sprayed all along the tailbed, smearing everywhere as its legs went out from under it and it tumbled to one side, its non-head flopping over the lip of the tailbed and one leg jerking around uselessly in death throes.

"Oh, Jesus, we killed it," Foggy felt himself say. He heard the spotlight squeak next to him and turned to get a quick glance; Matt was still there, still upright, still at his side.

"Loud," Matt yelled at him, shaking his head once, as well as he could.

"No shit," Foggy replied, relief thrumming alongside his adrenaline, because Matt responding to him meant the gun hadn't blown Matt's eardrums out. The noise had probably hurt like hell, and he'd apologize more for that later. Because there _was_ going to be a later, there _was_ , they were going to get out of this. They were going to be okay.

Foggy took in a deep breath, and almost started to believe it, but then the truck turned another corner and hit a patch of mud, and he could hear Karen shriek in rage and terror as it swung wide and uncontrolled and smashed sideways into a power pole.

It slammed Foggy against the edge of the sunroof and Matt against Foggy's back, the latter yelping high and sharp, either pain or fright-- Foggy couldn't untangle it at the moment. The gun jerked out of his hands and clattered loudly into the tailbed. He shouted most of his repertoire of curse words and twisted around, pulling one foot up onto the headrest so he could climb out and get the weapon.

He got halfway out of the sunroof, hearing the tires shriek for purchase. Chunks of mud flew out from under the truck and into the radius of the spotlight. The vehicle heaved forward and back, forward and back, as Karen tried and failed to dislodge it. He could hear her sobbing and cursing in fear.

The gun. They needed the gun. Foggy sucked in a breath and made to haul himself all the way out when Matt's hands grabbed him instead, yanking him back into the truck.

"Not safe!" Matt barked into his ear.

Foggy shook his head and pawed at him, trying to get him off and Matt grabbed his hands to keep him still. His heart was pounding. He was panicking. He knew that. He couldn't stop it. "The gun, Matt, we need that gun!"

"Foggy, no!" Matt's hands clutched him tighter and his wiry frame pressed against him, either to keep him where he was or to protect him. He flinched at another wail, almost before Foggy could hear it himself. "Inside. Not safe out," he managed, too scattered to come up with a proper string of words. "Get after."

Foggy's rifle was still on the floor. Matt let go of him long enough to shut the sunroof, then bent down to collect it, handing it over. Foggy's mind was already translating it for him, like a reflex, _Use this one. Make do with what we have._

Behind Matt, Karen was panting, still trying to get the tires free. It wasn't working. She was shifting the truck in and out of gear, slamming down on the gas pedal, eyes wide with panic, as she tried to dislodge the wheels from the mud. "Fuck," she was hissing, and then shouting, and then screaming. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck!"_

"Get it out!" Foggy yelled at her.

"I _can't!"_

God. They were stuck. Their stupid fucking stolen truck was _stuck in the goddamn dust-mud_ and they were trapped inside, neatly packaged in aluminum for the fuckers closing in on them outside.

Everywhere was their wailing. Loud, echoing, endless air raid sirens in the night. Rain dripped in through the sunroof, rattled against the truck's exterior, that constant hissing noise that sounded more alien than the _fucking aliens_ that were shrieking all around them.

They were all panting at different speeds, their white noise echoing the rain. There was another shriek from outside, getting closer.

"Oh, God," Karen was saying, "oh God, oh God, please, oh my God, _please_."

The truck leaned forward, leaned back. The tires whirred uselessly and couldn't get purchase.

"Shit. Oh, shit."

Foggy shook his head, felt his skin burning from the rain, looked over at Matt pressed up next to him, shivering. The wail outside again, closer, closer. They were going to die. They were fucking dead. Wouldn't be long now.

Then, Matt set his jaw, head tilted to one side. Carefully, his right hand closed over Foggy's own, and then he was tugging him toward the passenger door. "Come. Karen," Matt bit out clumsily, choked and afraid. "Karen, come, come."

She stared at them, her eyes bright with fear, distrust rippling across her face for a second. Then it was gone, and she nodded and moved after them.

Matt paused, grabbing the medical duffel and shoving it into Foggy's arms. Karen grabbed her own backpack and Matt's, and then Matt took up his curtain rod from the floor, popped the truck door open, and led them out. They followed as he moved down the side of the truck. Behind them, an alien wailed, high and piercing, so goddamn close that Foggy was sure he could smell it. They all flinched, but Matt grabbed Foggy's hand and yanked him along, pulling him into the building that the power pole they'd collided with had once given life to.

Glass crunched under Foggy's feet as he stumbled into the dusty space, lit only by the truck's headlights outside. The light didn't go far, but Matt kept leading them further in, and after a couple of seconds Foggy couldn't see anything at all. He could hear Karen's feet behind him, though, hurrying along, and reached back to grab her-- his hand landed on her shoulder and then her arm and he wrapped his fingers around it carefully.

"Come on," he said, and Matt made a sudden, sharp hiss.

"Silence, Foggy," he breathed, a ghost in his ear. "They find."

Foggy couldn't see a goddamned thing, tightening his fingers against Matt's hand-- his bad one, he could feel the tremor, the muscles jumping against his palm, the tape keeping his busted ring finger together with his middle. Matt turned his hand around, threading clumsy fingers through Foggy's, and squeezed despite the injury, then pulled him a little closer. _I'm here. Stay with me_.

Something shrieked outside, closer than it had ever been, and he felt Matt's jolt of fear. He kept moving, though, guiding Foggy and Karen through the dark and empty space, never stopping. Foggy reached out with his other hand and felt a wall, a light switch, and a shelf that he jerked his fingers away from so he didn't knock anything down and make noise. Another beeping wail. Matt didn't pause, not for another couple dozen steps, when he slowed to a stop and untangled his fingers from Foggy's.

It was so goddamned dark. Foggy couldn't even wonder if this was what Matt's world felt like, because he knew it wasn't. Matt's perception of the world was all vibration and bouncing sound and smells. If he saw anything at all in that torn mind of his, any sort of mental picture, it was something that Foggy would never be able to imagine, so he rolled over, and trusted.

Matt found him again, one knuckle brushing gentle over of the back of Foggy's hand before he grabbed it. "Silence," he heard Matt breathe, and heard something click, heard the faint squeak of a door hinge, and then Matt was pulling them into another space. It smelled like stagnant air, and his free hand hit a wall before he was even a few feet inside. Foggy tried to focus, to see how Matt would see, and all he could come up with was that they'd been pulled into a much smaller room. A closet, maybe.

He heard Karen's breathing coming close, and Matt's hand left his, and then the hinge squeaking again, the door closing. Foggy felt totally disoriented, disconnected from his body without his eyesight to show him where he was. "Matty," he breathed, as quietly as he could. He was still panting. They were all panting, all of them animals pressed into a corner, all of them afraid. "Where are we, buddy?"

"Safe," was the answer he got. "Foggy, wait."

Karen was moving around; he could tell she was touching the walls, trying to get a feel for where they were. Always moving, always trying to figure things out. Foggy was infinitely grateful. His pounding heart wasn't leaving much space for investigation.

"It's a closet or something," she whispered, at length. "Matt, is it safe to turn on a light?"

Foggy could hear the gears turning in Matt's head as he tried to figure that out, but Matt eventually just pushed out a breath and a, "Don't know, Karen." Because how would he?

She started fumbling for something, then made a low sigh, and then light bloomed weakly through the space. It was his penlight. Karen's face hovered above it for a second, pale and afraid, and then she moved it, tilted it around. Three sides of the room were made of unpainted drywall, a particleboard door on the fourth. A stack of boxes in one corner and papers scattered beneath their feet. A storage room, for an office of some kind.

Matt was next to the door, breathing rapidly, his good hand pressed against the particleboard, curtain rod leaned into the corner next to him. There was a shriek outside, a distant rattle, an echo of a melodic beeping wail. He stood still and listened to it all, head tilting around, shoulders stiff.

Karen moved away from him and to Foggy's side, holding out the penlight. He took it, holding it dully as he leaned against the closet wall, sucking in deep breaths, trying to calm down. By the sound of it, Karen was doing the same.

But she spoke, very quietly, barely audible. She knew Matt was concentrating. Jesus, at least she'd learned something. "We need to..." she huffed a breath, wiped her face, "...get to Yonkers. We're fucked if we stay out here. They've got... a hell of a lot more defenses in place."

Foggy clutched the penlight between two fingers like a cigarette as he pushed his own hair out of his face, where it'd been blown by the air outside the truck. "We can't go to Yonkers."

"We have to."

He gestured to Matt, who didn't take notice. "With a feral? They'll kill him." Foggy took another, deeper breath, finally feeling his respirations slowing the hell down. Rubbing his face, he looked over at her, fully expecting her to shake her head, tell him to leave Matt where he was, and come with her to safety. He expected her to dump them both, do whatever she needed to do to keep herself safe.

Instead, she sighed, pushing her fingers through her hair, muttered a pained, "Shit," and Foggy knew that she had no intention of leaving either of them, thank God. It made something warm burst in his chest. Or maybe it was the adrenaline. His heart was pounding too hard to figure it out.

Matt was catching his breath, at least, leaning his forehead against the door. Foggy turned the weak beam of the penlight toward him. "Matty," he whispered. "Where are they?"

It took him a minute to answer, and it was barely above a whisper. "Every-- everyth-- where. Everywhere." He twitched, and shut his eyes, leaning harder against the door. "This... this not good."

Foggy was surprised at Karen's words when she spoke up. "What should we do, Matt?" Shit was real fucking dire if she was asking _him_ for aid.

He huffed, then stifled a growl. "Wait. More time. It..." he lifted his head from the door, words faint and disconnected, "...mm, storm. Not a lot storm."

"Until the storm's over?" Foggy asked.

"Yes."

"How long until then?"

Matt rolled his eyes, then turned half-toward them. "I don't know this, Foggy." He moved through the two feet of space between them, and sat on the floor, dropping his face into his hands. A low whine bubbled out of his throat.

"Hey, man, hey," Foggy whispered, putting his duffel bag on the floor before lowering himself to the floor. "It's all right. We're gonna be all right."

A few seconds passed, and then Matt lifted his face from his hands, oriented himself toward Foggy. His expression was heavy, eyes damp. Skin reddened and irritated from being caught in the rain. "You lie, Foggy."

"Enough with that, dude. Stop listening to my heart. Listen to my voice."

Matt huffed and put his face in his hands again. Foggy sat next to him with a sigh, leaning his rifle into the corner of the tiny space and setting the penlight on the stack of boxes. The light was faint, but it was light. "It's okay, Matty. We'll... we'll catch our breath, wait for the storm to pass, get back to the truck. I'm sure there's some kind of board or something we can put under the tires, dislodge it."

Karen slowly slid down to the floor, tucking her knees against her chest. "Yonkers is our best chance," she started again, pulling the subject back into focus. "We're going to get fucking slaughtered out here."

"No. They'll kill Matt."

"Maybe we can convince them to--"

Foggy scoffed, interrupting her. "Yeah, that'll end well. You don't remember me trying to explain it to you? A lot of good it did. You still wanted to kill him."

"Here," Matt said, softly.

Karen ignored him. "But I came around, didn't I?"

"Yeah, eventually! Like, a week ago! Karen, no. We can't take him there. They'll kill him on the spot. You _know_ they will."

Matt pressed his knuckles in his eyes, leaning hard against his arms with a frustrated sound. He knew he was the reason they couldn't just up and drive to safety there. "Sorry," he breathed out.

Foggy nudged him, none-too-gently, ignoring his flinch. "Knock that off. Well figure it out, okay?" There had to be a way around it, or another place they could stay. He looked over at Karen. "Anywhere else we can go? Are there other settlements?"

"Yes, outside the city. But they're way... way too far. Yonkers is our best bet."

Matt was pushing his fingers through his hair. His left hand got caught up in the tangles. "Foggy," he mumbled, frowning and lifting his head, "...you go. You, Karen, go." He dropped his shivering hand, pointed at the floor. "I stay."

Anger rose so harsh and sharp in Foggy's head that his words came out as a sputter when he started a retort.

And Karen, goddamn, she was _glaring_. She spoke over Foggy's stammer, her voice a dark hiss. "Don't be fucking ridiculous, Matt, we aren't leaving you behind."

And she could hide it with a million selfish excuses, but Foggy could tell. He'd seen enough of her, and enough of Matt, and enough of her _with_ Matt to be able to see the truth. She wanted him there, just like _he_ wanted _her_ there.

Still, Matt turned his face in her direction, eyebrows raising in surprise.

"You fucking heard me, Matt. Don't start this heroic sacrifice shit now." She was still glaring, even though it was a worthless action. "Like Foggy said, we'll figure it out."

Foggy caught her gaze, mouthed a wide and obvious _'Thank you.'_

She rolled her eyes at him, like what she'd said didn't matter, like it wasn't one of the most important things she could ever tell Matt-- that he fucking meant something to her. That she wanted him around. That she wasn't afraid of him. That she _trusted him._

Well, maybe trust was still too strong a word for Karen. She was trying. That's what mattered.

Matt let out another huff, then opened his mouth to say something, probably another protest. He didn't get any noise out, though, mouth snapping shut as his head jerked in a sharp, involuntary twitch toward the closet door. His eyes darted around and Foggy already knew what he was about to say, what was about to happen.

There was a loud wail from outside, in the direction of the crashed truck. The noise pitched upward, turned into a series of rapid beeps and clicks-- it was talking. Yelling, really. Foggy had heard it before. It never sounded less strange to listen to. When it fell quiet, Matt was still tilting his head, listening.

An answer came, from all around them, every direction. There was no translation necessary for it. They'd been told where the prey was, and now they were going to converge.

Matt started breathing hard again, and got to his feet. "Need go," he murmured, grabbing Foggy's duffel from the corner of the room and handing it to him. "Now."

Foggy and Karen were on their feet, supplies gathered, in a few short seconds, and then Matt was leading them through the dark again. Out the closet and down a hallway, the opposite direction of where they'd come from, then through a wider room that Foggy could only tell was bigger because of the echo of their footsteps on the warped floor. Cold air brushed his face and he heard the rain again, that endless roaring hiss. Matt's fingers were tangled back into his, and he halted just as Foggy's feet landed on something that felt softer-- carpet. An entryway rug, he thought.

Another gentle tug, and they were outside-- rain sprayed into his face, and he could hear the loud dribble next to him as if it were pouring off of a roof gutter. It felt like he'd stepped into an endless void, with nothing to anchor him but Matt's palm against his.

So he squeezed Matt's shaking hand, and Matt squeezed back weakly with his busted finger and atrophied muscles. _Still here, Foggy._

Foggy wiped his face, bit down on the hiss that tried to come out of his mouth as rain slid under his coat sleeve and down his arm. God, why did he care? They were probably going to die. A skin infection should be the furthest thing from his mind right now. He adjusted the duffel on his shoulder, felt Karen's slim, strong hand close on his upper arm.

The ground beneath him sloped, and then they were moving downhill. To his right was silence-- buildings. His left was the cacophony of the storm, and a trill that echoed all around them.

Matt stopped them after a few minutes, and Foggy felt him stiffen all over, then remove his hand and push Foggy back with his hand on his chest. Karen simply followed as Matt pressed them back into a doorway of some kind, a foyer. He thought he heard Matt breathe a _"Silence,_ " and the word was very nearly its own definition.

There was a loud trill, impossibly fucking close, right above them, and he could feel Matt shaking as he pressed back against Foggy's chest. Karen was panting, but he could hear her trying to get it under control.

A heavy thud, right in front of them, and Foggy could see it-- he could actually see something, drifting through the dark in front of them. It was a faint blue glow, organic, tracing through zigzagged lines and moving fluidly. A goddamned alien. Not thirty feet away. He was going to vomit and his heart was gonna be mixed into the mess.

Matt didn't move, keeping Foggy and Karen boxed into the foyer, shielding them. Foggy was pretty sure his heartbeat was deafening his own goddamned ears, which was fine because the only thing he was using right now was his eyes, staring frozen at the figure in front of them as it moved around. He could hear its feet landing in puddles, could see the blue arc of its claws.

The wail came again, melodic, and a soft trill. It was so close that Foggy could _smell it_ , that rubber band mixed with burnt ozone and the sharp, alien tang that sent an icy shudder through his whole body. He wasn't sure how he was smelling it if he couldn't breathe, because he knew he wasn't breathing.

It shifted, and moved to the right, the blue glow seeping from beneath its skin, bio-luminescent. Like a creature born of the deepest ocean. The noise of its feet hitting the street in an inconsistent rhythm came to his ears, and splashing as it hit water. It made a noise like paper sliding over itself, ocean waves, and the blue light grew brighter, shifted like mercury, and then it screeched, beeped once, and bounded away.

Foggy's eyes were locked onto it, watching as the glow drifted off, listening as its noises faded and they were left in the cacophony of rain and panting and distant thunder.

He wanted to scream, _Holy fucking Jesus, I can't believe we are alive right now_ , but he settled for a sharp, heavy sigh, and a deep, long intake of air. Karen was panting again; Matt seemed the calmest of them all, but Foggy could hear him huffing through his nose as he grabbed Foggy's wrist and tugged him out of the foyer.

"Close," Matt whispered, and Foggy had no idea what he meant. He just followed.

They must have still been in Matt's territory, he figured, because Matt knew _exactly_ where he was going, leading them down the hill and around a corner, shuttling them across a street, through a doorway, then a building, and out to an alley. Foggy only guessed it was an alley due to the quiet on either side of them. They stumbled in the dark, fumbling about, and Foggy had never wanted light as much as he did then. Any light. He'd settle for a goddamn ass-and-pickle scented candle.

At the end of the alley-- what sounded like the end of the alley-- Matt halted again, herded them back behind him as an alien charged past. All Foggy heard was its legs, the non-rhythm of its feet stomping down the road. He flinched too hard to catch a glimpse of it.

Matt waited a long few minutes-- a _way_ too long few minutes, Foggy's whole face was burning and itching and it felt like it might fall off-- before he took Foggy's hand again and pulled him out of the alley. They went underneath eaves, and Foggy wished they could stay there a while and not get rained on. He wished they could stop, just for a minute, just long enough to catch their breath, to calm down, but Matt kept moving.

Karen finally opened her mouth as he led them through another building. "Where are we _going_ , Matt? Do you have a fucking pl--"

" _Silence_ , Karen," Matt hissed back at her, a sharp order-- Foggy had never heard an actual order from Matt's mouth before, least of all to Karen. Not after the brain damage. "I g-- I got it," he murmured, tugging Foggy's hand again. "Come."

It felt like another block or so passed beneath their feet, and then Matt slowed, and mumbled in Foggy's ear. "Stairs. Careful." He started pulling him down.

Down. Stairs going down. From street level.

Foggy jolted to a stop after the fourth step. Oh, fuck no. "This is the _subway_ , Matt," he breathed, trying to untangle his hand from Matt's fingers. "We can't go down here."

"Can." Matt held firm, tugged him harder. "Hurry."

He heard footsteps next to him, and Karen's light steps as she passed. "If they're all up here, they're not down there," she hissed. "Come _on_."

This was the worst idea in the world, Foggy thought. They were going to fucking die down there. Dread was settling over his whole body, and it was fucking freezing. Matt pulled on his hand again.

" _Foggy_ ," he hissed, urgent.

Jesus. What fucking choice did he have? Foggy blew out a breath, then started down the stairs, gripping Matt's hand tightly. He nearly biffed it when he hit the station floor, expecting another stair to be there, but Matt halted and leaned back against him, stopping him from pitching downward. "Christ," he muttered. "Thanks."

"Is okay," Matt breathed, gently untangling his hand with a soft hiss. Jesus, right, his broken finger. Foggy was an asshole. Another hand grabbed him-- Matt's good one, wiry, steady. He called out softly over Foggy's shoulder. "Karen?"

"Right behind you guys." She was smart. And a lot less clumsy than Foggy was.

"Okay. Come," Matt said again, leading Foggy along. He slipped through the turnstile and Foggy bumped into it, then shifted sideways to wiggle through it.

It smelled awful. Not just that strong biting scent of aliens, either. He could smell rot, and waste, and mold, and the smell of the river. Foggy wondered if it was a bad sign that he didn't gag. Matt let go of his hand and he fought back panic as his friend's footsteps drew away, toward the tunnel, leaving him standing in a void of total nothingness. Then he heard Karen draw up next to him, felt her hand fumble around at his back before grasping onto his upper arm, and relaxed.

There was a scraping noise, and then, "Here, Foggy, Karen," Matt's voice was finally coming above a whisper, but not much more than that. "Here."

"I'm coming," he grunted, listening to his boots squeak on the floor. "I can't see, Matt."

"Know that. Listen, me. Come."

Foggy did as told, following the sound of Matt's soft, fractured voice, until a gentle, shaking hand tapped along his upper arm. "We need light, Matt. We can't keep going without it, okay?"

"Know that. Mm, no. Not. Um." Matt huffed in frustration, and started leading Foggy along the floor, through a doorway that he bumped into on the way through. It smelled a little cleaner past the door, especially after he heard Matt slide it shut. "Light now," Matt said, and it took about two seconds before Karen was turning on the penlight.

Even with the weak glow of that shitty thing, Foggy blinked and squinted. Fuck, it was disorienting, stumbling through the dark for what felt like hours, only to be tossed back into light without much warning. He shook his head, trying to clear the feeling out of his mind, and looked around. He'd brought them inside one of the trains, still sitting at the station for that last ride. The windows were boarded, the doors taped over. It looked like someone else had holed up down here, long before they'd shown up. There was a thick layer of dust all over everything.

Matt was bent down next to one of the benches, digging around in his backpack. He stood back up with a flashlight in his hand, a cheap plastic piece of shit from the apartment that Foggy couldn't remember him grabbing. It was a million times better than the penlight. He handed it over, and Foggy turned it on, revealing more of the train-- ancient brown bloodstains on the floor, a pile of twisted fabric in one corner that smelled fucking awful. Matt had set his curtain rod against one of the other doors.

Karen was standing across from him, streaks of red irritation and grey rain all down her face, still catching her breath. Matt looked worse. Foggy suspected his own face would be the ugliest.

"Are we safe down here, Matt?" Karen asked, setting her bags down on one of the seats.

"No," he replied, moving down to the end of the train car, checking to make sure it was secure. Hell, they weren't safe _anywhere_. They wouldn't have even been safe in the goddamn apartment. "Ferals, here. They hide. Like you, like me."

"There's ferals down here?"

Matt huffed. He came back toward them, tilting his head around, still listening. His words became more garbled as his concentration waffled. "Yes. Won't, um. Bother."

"How do you know that?"

"My territory," was his simple answer, as he moved back to Foggy's side, like he belonged nowhere else. "They know. Know me. I am..." he huffed a low laugh, and it reminded Foggy of the humorless little chuckles he would have made before all this, "...not good. For them."

Foggy was starting to appreciate how often Matt had gone out, how much territory he'd claimed. "What about aliens?"

"All up."

Karen was rubbing her face, half in exhaustion, half in pain. Foggy sighed, leaning against one of the bench rails. At least they were out of the rain. At least they weren't running anymore. Matt seemed to know what he was doing, where he was taking them, and that was something. He must have scoped this area out ages ago, and remembered it. Jesus, they were lucky to have him.

Foggy certainly wasn't going to stand around and do nothing, either. He took his duffel off of his back and set it on one of the benches. "Okay, Matty. Over here. Let's see how bad your face looks."

The man in question grunted-- irritation, the prick-- and came over while Foggy got his penlight back from Karen. At least she'd grabbed it. Just like Karen to keep her head in a damn crisis, while Foggy ran around like a chicken with its fucking head halfway off.

He waved Matt over, sticking the penlight in his mouth as he tapped his friend's shoulder before gently taking his chin, tilting his face up into the light. His expression was dark and worried, and his eyes were darting all over, agitated. There were reddened patches spreading across his skin already, just like when he'd fallen in the Hudson.

Foggy suspected that looking at Matt would be a bit like looking into a mirror, that his own face looked pretty similar. Whenever he moved his jaw, he could feel the muscles tugging at the irritation. It felt like a really bad sunburn.

He took the penlight out of his mouth and held it with his left hand. "Does it hurt bad?" he asked, leaning over to dig through his duffel bag.

"Not a lot."

Typical answer. Foggy grabbed a handful of alcohol wipes, the kind wrapped in individual paper packages. "Normally, I'd clean you off with water, but I think we should probably conserve what we have."

Karen spoke up from across the train car, where she was sitting on the opposite bench. "I've got a few bottles in my bag. I know Matt's got some in his."

"One..." Matt paused, scrunching up his nose when Foggy opened one of the wipes. "...Mm. Four. Four water. Uh. Waters."

"Water _bottles_ ," Foggy gently corrected, leaning in to wipe at the trailing murky grey water that was painted all over Matt's face.

"Bottles," Matt repeated, then hissed at the touch of the alcohol, and flinched, but stayed where he was. His right hand balled into a fist at his side; the other got about halfway there before stopping, the tape and the injury underneath it impeding his movement. He'd still gripped Foggy's hand like there was nothing wrong at all.

"I know it hurts. I'm going as fast as I can." And he was-- he liked to think to himself that he was pretty quick at this shit, but it was only because he'd been giving medical attention to a spastic feral on the regular for... how long was it now? A couple of months, at least, since they'd moved into Eric's apartment.

God, he hoped it hadn't been destroyed. He'd really liked that place. It felt like home.

Foggy tilted Matt's head around to get to all the rain, then opened another wipe to scrub it out of his hair. "Hold still. You don't need another haircut yet," he said, watching as Matt's eyes kept flicking all over the place. Still listening. Foggy frowned. "...Are they nearby, Matty?"

"Yes."

"How far?"

"Mm. Two, one blocks. Not far."

"What if they come down here?"

Matt huffed a breath through his nose; it tickled against Foggy's face. "We go."

"Go where?"

"Tunnel," he said, gesturing weakly behind him.

"What if we get trapped down here?"

Another huff. "Won't. I know."

Foggy's hands stilled. "What? Have you been _down here_ before?"

Matt's eyebrows crumpled and he hummed a non-answer.

Jesus, seriously? "You came down here by yourself? What the fuck, man."

"Not-- Foggy, not a lot," Matt said, frowning. "Was safe."

He hadn't come home dead, so yeah, he was right, but _goddamnit._ "Matty... God." He sighed harsh through his nose, and it twitched through Matt's hair. "Fuck it. Not worth yelling at you over it right now."

Karen finally spoke up from the other bench. "You should be grateful. That's how he knew this train was here."

"Yeah, I know that." Foggy was torn between relenting to her and giving into his reflex to drill Matt about it, to tell him how reckless he was being. He ended up halfway between the two, because Karen was right, and Karen was also standing up for Matt-- which was new. New, and awesome, despite the situation. "...Thanks, Matt."

"Mm." His face relaxed out of the 'Murdock-Is-Primed-To-Be-Yelled-At' look. The red patches across his skin looked painful, and it made Foggy's face itch more just looking at it.

He patted Matt's shoulder. "All done, dude."

For a minute, it looked like he was going to move off, but then he licked his lips, blinked a few times, and leaned in to give Foggy a nudge. Foggy pushed back like he always did; Matt shifted and rubbed their foreheads together with all the gentleness in the world. The emotions on his face could be read so clearly at this proximity. He was scared. Fucking terrified. It made Foggy's stomach twist into freezing cold knots.

"We're going to be okay, Matty," he said, softly, tangling his fingers in the short hair at the nape of his friend's neck. "Okay? We'll get through this." It was a lie. Matt knew it was a lie.

Matt said nothing about it, and leaned harder into him.

They pulled away eventually, about at the same time, and he sighed, reaching up with the wipe to clear the rain off of Matt's forehead that had carried over from his own skin. "Eat something, okay? I gotta clean off Karen now."

"Okay," Matt sighed, moving to the bench and sitting down slowly. He looked exhausted, but he turned and dug into his backpack, finding a half-roll of crackers, and ate them sluggishly.

When Foggy turned to tend to Karen, she was already upright, plucking the alcohol wipe out of his hand. "You need to get clean first," she said. "You look worse than Matt."

"Well, that's a first."

"Shut up. Sit down."

"Pushy."

Karen rolled her eyes, snatching a clean wipe from his bag and ripping it open. He jerked hard the second the alcohol touched him, biting down on his reflexive yelp of pain. Christ, it felt like she'd blown fire at him.

"Jesus. _Ow_."

"Yeah, what did you think it was gonna feel like?"

"I was going off of Matt's reaction," Foggy said, feeling his stomach knot up some more at the knowledge that Matt had hidden the pain away instead of letting Foggy see it. "If I'd known it hurt this much, Matt, I wouldn't have done it so roughly. Damn."

"I am okay," Matt mumbled around a mouthful of cracker, chewing slowly.

"Yeah, all right." Foggy wasn't convinced. Judging by the look on Karen's face, she wasn't either. And actually, if he looked hard enough at Matt, he could see it on his face, too. Foggy sighed and squished his eyes shut, gritting his teeth at the pain. Getting it off now was better than letting it stay. He preferred to have skin over his cheekbones, after all.

It didn't take her long-- she'd been getting a lot of practice at cleaning wounds, thanks to Matt. She'd learned a hell of a lot from Foggy, most of it with her just observing. Afterward, he cleaned her off, which took even less time, and then went through their shit. Matt stayed on the bench, leaning his head against the train window, eyes unmoving as he surveyed the area around them.

Karen sat next to him, pulling things out of her backpack. There was a pistol at the bottom-- the nine millimeter that Matt had found, ages ago. She checked the slide, and then the safety before setting it on the bench next to her. "How long are we going to be down here?" she asked Matt, who didn't respond. He looked like he had in the apartment earlier, when his own focus had overtaken everything around them. It was still scary as fucking hell.

Foggy blew out a breath, trying to force his nervousness out with the air in his lungs. It didn't work. "Leave him be. We'll head back out when the storm stops."

"We haven't got the supplies for a... fucking camping trip."

"No shit. When it's daylight, we'll head back."

"What time is it now?"

"Haven't got a clue. I didn't grab my watch." Because he was an idiot. "Probably the middle of the night. It's dark as fuck out there. If it was daytime, there would have been _some_ kind of fucking light."

She sighed, pulling a few extra magazines out of her bag. "Those fucking things have been waiting years for a chance like this. To come at us with cover."

"Why didn't they just wait until nighttime, like at the shelter?"

Karen shook her head. "I don't know."

"The rain didn't seem to fuck with them at all."

"Lucky pricks." She dug out the two bottles of water from the bottom of her bag, setting them next to the ones Foggy got out of Matt's. They both stared at the lineup. "That's not a whole lot," she said.

"No, it isn't. We'll have to conserve."

"How much food is there?"

Foggy slowly took it all out, took stock. Some cans, some bagged things with a long shelf-life. A few packages of crackers leftover from the MREs. Not a whole hell of a lot. He went to rub his face and had to stop once he actually touched himself, the skin flaring with bright, painful irritation. Settling with crossing his arms and digging a thumb along his own collarbone, he let out a long sigh.

"We're pretty screwed."

"Yeah," she agreed, weakly.

He swallowed back the growl of irritation and helplessness that was trying to come out of him. No, he didn't have time for that. None of them had time for that. "It's not like we can send Matt out for more."

"He wouldn't be able to do much. Look at him."

Foggy squeezed his eyes shut, opened them slowly. Matt's head was leaning slightly on one of the boarded windows, face and eyes empty as anything. He was deep into it, listening to the aliens outside, just like at the apartment. That must have been what he was doing, before Karen had gone and blown the whistle and broken his concentration on it. Foggy wondered what it felt like. Was it relieving, only having to focus one sense on one thing? He knew how overwhelming Matt's senses could get to him.

"He looks uncomfortable," Karen said quietly.

God, he did. Foggy climbed carefully to his feet and moved over, sitting next to Matt on the bench. He shook him slightly; no response.

"Hey, buddy," he said, placing a hand on the back of Matt's neck to get his attention.

He gave a slight jolt, then turned his head toward Foggy. "Hm?"

"You okay?"

"Foggy, yes. I li-- listening. I am listening." He leaned his head against the boarded window again, fiddling with the tape on his left hand. When Foggy didn't budge, he turned his head again, attempted a reassuring smile. Matt still had the worst lying face in the world. It just looked pained. "I am okay."

"Where are they now?"

"Mm." His eyes rolled around in thought. "One, two. Above." He pointed to the roof of the train. "Three, four, five, mm... there." He pointed behind him. "Six, there. Seven, eight, there." Matt kept gesturing in different directions. He had all of their locations goddamn pinpointed. Jesus, no wonder he went catatonic when he did that shit. "Mm, nine, ten... that way. Very a lot far." He continued all the way to sixteen-- because Foggy had killed the seventeenth in the truck's tailbed. Some of them were too far for him to get exact locations, and he said so, but the fact that he even knew what direction they were in was incredible.

Foggy knew his mouth was hanging open; he glanced at Karen and she had about the same look on her face. "Jesus, Matt." Again, he clenched his fist, feeling the tug against the back of his hand of the scratches Matt had left there.

Matt blinked and scratched his cheek, looking self-conscious. "Not good?"

"No. God, no. It's good. It's amazing. How do you do that?" He wasn't too sure why he was asking for an explanation. Matt wouldn't be able to get one. All of this was just reflex and instinct to him. Muscle memory didn't carry goddamn instruction manuals. "Nevermind," he said, when Matt tried to come up with an answer. "It just happens, right?"

"Foggy, yes."

"Are you going to keep listening?"

Matt rolled his eyes. "Foggy, _yes_ ," he said, extending the second word. His version of an _'Obviously, asshole.'_ He tucked his legs up on the seat with himself, wiggling to get a little more comfortable.

Karen got up from the floor, shucking her jacket off and handing it over. "Here. Keep yourself warm."

He reached for it carefully without turning his head. They'd rushed out of the apartment too quickly and he hadn't taken his own. "Thank you, Karen." As Foggy took it and put it on Matt's shoulders, his eyes flicked to the floor and he oriented his face toward her. "Karen, no, um. Whistle. Please."

She touched her chest where hers was laying. "Oh. Of course not."

A twitch of a smile went across his face. "Thank you." He tugged the jacket closer around himself, patted Foggy's arm awkwardly, and leaned his head against the window. Christ, Foggy could see the exact moment he lost focus on them and stretched his senses outside. It was more than a little frightening.

Then again, Matt's hearing was the only reason they were still alive. And it would be the only reason they'd continue to _stay_ alive.

Foggy got up off the bench, giving his coat to Karen-- _"Musical jackets,_ " she mumbled under her breath-- and then sat next to her, waiting. The storm would pass soon, and then they could get the hell out of this stinking subway tunnel and back home. He couldn't wait to see the sun again. Yawning, he drew his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around his legs, and sighed. Storms didn't last forever, right? It would pass.

\---

It didn't pass.

They sat in that train, the three of them, for probably around four hours (it felt like four days), and nothing changed. Karen ended up turning off the flashlights to conserve power and sitting back against one of the benches, leaning up against Foggy. Matt didn't move at all, except for the involuntary twitching and shaking. Just like at the apartment. Foggy was too afraid to break his concentration, knowing that he was tracking all the aliens _at fucking once_.

So, they waited. And waited. Nothing changed except the amount of time that had passed, and even that seemed like an illusion.

It was Karen, of course, who eventually spoke up, disintegrating the terse, black silence they'd been wrapped up in. She kept her voice low, but Foggy could hear the impatience in it. The carefully hidden fear. "There's got to be something we can do besides sitting here with our thumbs in our asses." He heard the sound of fumbling as she produced the flashlight and turned it on.

Foggy sighed, blinking, adjusting to the light. "Like what? We can't go out there, we'll get offed in two seconds." He stared over at Matt. Same position, same blank stare.

"Maybe we could explore the station. See if there's anything useful."

"I don't think that's a good idea."

Karen rubbed her face and pushed her fingers through her hair. It stuck up all over from a mixture of sweat and dried alcohol from the wipe. Her skin, too, was covered in flaky red patches. She scratched the edge of one with the back of her thumb and talked again, voice low, unguarded. Hesitant, like she was revealing a deep secret. "...I hate not being able to do anything."

"I know you do." Jesus, his throat was dry. Foggy leaned over and grabbed one of the bottles of water. It was from the purifier, at least. Of all their things in the apartment, he hoped that the purifier was the thing that remained in one piece. He opened the bottle and took a sip, swallowing slowly, trying to savor it.

"Can I have some?" Karen asked softly.

Foggy grunted and handed it over. When she gave it back, it was half-empty, and he started removing a tick mark from his mental inventory. He rolled the bottle between his palms for a minute before getting to his feet and crossing the space to Matt. Placing his other palm on the back of Matt's neck, like before, he tried to gently extract him from... well, sensory tunnel vision, was the only definition Foggy could come up with. "Buddy? You there?"

Matt took in a sharp breath through his nose and grunted. "Hm?"

"Hey, dude. You've been sitting there for hours, you know."

"I know." Jesus, he sounded fucking exhausted. He _looked_ fucking exhausted. It was like seeing him on a plateau again. Foggy fucking hated it. "Can hear them."

"Here, let's drink some water, okay?" Sitting down, he guided the bottle into Matt's good hand. "Drink it."

It took him a while to process the request, and even then, he only tilted the bottle to his lips and swallowed a tiny sip, barely anything at all. He offered it back with a frown, leaning his head against the window again.

"Can you drink the rest of it, buddy?"

Matt's jaw jumped. "I am okay," he said, voice faint, and was gone again.

Foggy sighed, rubbing his hand over Matt's back for a minute before getting up and returning to his spot next to Karen. It must have been the middle of the night, because that was the only excuse he could come up with for how fucking tired he was. He settled onto the floor, leaning slightly into Karen's shoulder.

She leaned back. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"No," Foggy said, putting his face in his hands. "There isn't."

\---

He didn't even realize he'd fallen asleep until Matt was in front of him, shaking his shoulder, hissing loudly into his ear.

"Need go."

Foggy jerked awake, clambered to his feet, turning on the flashlight. "Christ. Jesus. Okay." He wiped his face roughly, remembering too late that his entire face was burnt from the rain. He ended up biting hard on his tongue to stop a yelp of pain from barreling out of his mouth.

Matt tugged Karen to her feet, shoved Foggy's rifle into her hands. She fumbled with it, slinging it over her shoulder, moving with a wordless haste. He snatched up his curtain rod-- still leaning against one of the other doors-- and led them down the length of the train. Jamming the rod into the exit door, he levered it open and held it there so they could squeeze through. Karen halted and turned to do the same for him.

He gave her a strained, tired smile. His face was pale. He hadn't slept, Foggy realized. He hadn't slept, and he'd been pushing himself non-stop. Anyone else would probably be all right, but Matt had the virus with that horrible fatigue always weighing him down, and then he'd sat and put his senses to work far harder than he'd ever done. For fucking _hours_.

And Foggy had sat on the floor and fallen asleep like the asshole he was.

Matt, however, didn't seem to notice his own exhaustion, guiding them down the train car and into the next, then out the emergency exit and into the tunnel. The smell immediately made Foggy want to turn back and hide inside the train again. It was so fucking concentrated, burnt plastic and that sharp, horrible scent that made some instinctive part of his brain turn on and go into overdrive.

The gravel skittered under their feet as they made their way through the tunnel, every slight noise bouncing off the concrete around them, amplifying it. Normally Matt would be the one moving with enough grace to stop from making any noise, but now he was clumsy, stumbling. That wasn't a good sign. Keeping his flashlight trained on the path in front of them, Foggy hurried to keep pace.

Matt kept leading them further and further inward without pausing. Foggy had no fucking clue where the hell they actually were, in relation to the city above. They just kept going, and going, through a tunnel that seemed endless, dark concrete arcing above them. Karen was panting in front of him, but she was keeping up. She was in good shape. Foggy sucked ass at this long-distance endurance bullshit.

It felt like they'd traveled all the way to the center of the earth before Matt slowed to a stop, breathing hard through his nose, listening intently to something. Foggy sidled up next to him, leaning over his knees.

"Christ, how lo--"

Matt made a sharp chuffing noise at him in lieu of an actual word, waving his good hand clumsily in Foggy's direction. _Dude, shut the fuck up_ , is probably what that meant.

Foggy clenched his jaw and shut the fuck up.

Another few moments, and Matt was grabbing his arm and tugging him toward the tunnel wall instead of further along the rail, down another hundred meters or so. A door had been built into the concrete-- a maintenance room. He climbed up onto the lip of the platform, then turned and helped Foggy up next to him. God, he was so pale. He looked awful. Foggy wanted to throw up.

Karen hopped up without much effort. Damn her and her fucking ostrich legs.

"Come," Matt breathed, moving toward the maintenance door. He brushed the fingertips of his good hand down it until he hit the doorknob, and made a low grunt of irritation when it didn't turn.

"It's locked?" Foggy asked, breathless.

"Locked," Matt echoed. His voice was heavy with fatigue, and fear.

"Jesus. Now w--"

"Need," he hissed. His voice was fragmented all to hell. Foggy couldn't really blame him. For once, he wasn't even vaguely interested in trying to correct Matt's speech. "Need go. In. Now." Matt slapped his hand on the door.

Karen sidled up next to them. "I've got my handgun. Maybe we can..." she trailed off as a distorted sound echoed faintly down the tunnel, and turned her head toward it.

To say that Matt panicked would be a fair bit of an understatement. He made a choked sound, and grabbed Foggy's hand again, trying to lead him back the way they came, but Karen just shook her head, drawing her pistol.

"Cover his ears," she said, chambering a round.

Foggy snatched up a handful of Matt's hood, yanking him close and slapping his hands over his friend's ears before he could fight it or wiggle free and dart away. "Sorry," he whispered, and flinched as Karen fired the pistol. The noise sounded immense inside the tunnel, amplified from both directions, like thunder. His ears were goddamn ringing as Matt wrestled himself from Foggy's hands, growling weakly. At this distance, Foggy could see how bruised his eyes were, the exhaustion weighing down every inch of him.

" _Karen_ ," Matt started, but she was already yanking the door open, and he fell quiet and huffed through his nose in defeat. She ushered Matt inside and Foggy followed.

It was tiny and cramped, but it was something. At least they weren't out in the open. There was a desk in one corner; Matt grabbed the chair sitting next to it and Karen stepped back so he could jam it under the door handle. Foggy wasn't sure what good that could do against a goddamn alien, but it might keep a feral out.

He stacked their bags in one corner and Karen set the rifle in another; Matt stayed near the door, head canted, listening.

Barely a couple of minutes had passed before there was a trill from outside, echoing down the tunnel. All three of them retreated from the door; Foggy shut off the flashlight. They were plunged into the darkness again, and it made it feel like the space around them was tightening, getting smaller, filled only with the sound of their breathing.

He could hear heavy feet on gravel, whisper-soft at first, increasing steadily in volume. Every time that he was sure it was right on the other side of the door, it got impossibly louder. Foggy kept himself still, listening to Matt's breathing right next to him. Rapid and shallow and tired. He sounded how Foggy felt.

Outside the door, there was a low series of beeps, the sound of heavy feet, and it passed them by without pause. As the noise drew away, Foggy felt like all his will was drawing away right along with it. Jesus, how long could they keep doing this? How long could _Matt_ keep doing this?

Foggy got his answer when Matt stumbled on nothing, and he had to reach out and grab his friend's elbow to stop him from falling.

"Christ. You need to sit down, man."

Matt grumbled, but sluggishly moved to comply. Foggy guided him gently down until he was sitting against the wall. His eyes were glazed, head twitching harder and his whole arm shuddering with the tremor. He was going to fucking kill himself if he kept it up.

"Is he okay?" Karen asked from across the room, keeping her voice down.

"He needs to sleep," Foggy breathed. He went back to their bags, grabbing a bottle of water, a can of beans, a spoon, and frowned as he crossed the space to Matt's side, sitting down and nudging him gently. Matt startled with a weak snort, and Foggy hurried to gentle him while trying to hide the worry evident in his own voice. "Shh, sorry. Just me. Hey. You gotta eat something, okay? Can you eat something for me?"

"Fog. Not. Mm. Hungry," was all Matt would eke out, voice frail and soft and nearly incomprehensible. He lifted his head and it looked like it was the heaviest thing in the world. Jesus.

"Bullshit. Eat this." Foggy opened the can of beans and stuck the spoon inside. "Just a bit. You gotta eat, Matt."

His head started to twitch back and forth, back and forth. His eyelids fluttered.

"They're still close by?"

"...Yes." The word was mostly air.

"It's okay." Foggy guided the can into Matt's good hand, closed his fingers around it. Matt blinked slowly, unevenly, eyebrows hardening in confusion like it had just appeared out of thin air. He still took a bite, chewing slowly, and Foggy felt the tiny smile jump across his own face. "Good, buddy. Just eat that." He removed the can from his mental inventory.

"Can hear them," Matt mumbled, barely audible.

"I know you can."

"Everywhere."

"I know. Just eat, okay?"

He did, one small bite at a time, his jaw randomly stopping mid-chew like he kept forgetting he was doing it. Foggy just kept encouraging him, until the beans were gone, and Matt was just holding listlessly onto the can.

"Here, drink some water, all right?"

Matt made a vague, weak noise, and took a few sips before putting the bottle down. "'M... 'm tired. Fog," he whispered, like it was a dark secret nobody should ever know. He caught something on the edge of his hearing, head tilting automatically, and frustration and pain bloomed across his expression. He said something else, but it was nonsense.

"It's okay, buddy. I'll keep an eye on you. Nothing's going to happen. Okay? We're going to be fine. Nice and hidden in this room."

Karen came around and sat against the wall next to Matt, who didn't even notice she was there. He looked like he was about to fucking die. She touched his shoulder to let him know where she was and he startled, a weak buck, before realizing who she was and relaxing.

"Sorry," he mumbled.

"It's okay, Matt."

Foggy sighed. "Lie down, buddy. You need to sleep before you collapse." Fuck that, he was already to the point of collapse. He hooked a hand around Matt's shoulder and Matt listed, toppling over onto Foggy's lap, and he was asleep before he'd even settled, the can still in one hand. Foggy gently pried it out of his grip. "There. Shh."

Karen pulled her knees up and rested her arms on them. It was silent, save for their breathing, their minute shifting.

After a long handful of minutes, she took Foggy's jacket off her shoulders and draped it over Matt, who unconsciously shifted and burrowed his face deeper into Foggy's thigh.

Her voice was nothing but air. "Is he going to be okay?"

"Yeah."

"He's so out of it."

"...You know how much that virus makes him sleep. Imagine what it's like to stay awake for this long with that shit weighing down your system. With the amount of work he's doing with the whole... listening thing. That takes a lot of focus." He rubbed the back of his head on the wall. "Sixteen aliens. Jesus."

"It sounds like hell."

"I'm sure it is."

She frowned. "I can't believe we aren't dead yet."

"We're fucked sideways if something happens to him."

"We'll have to make sure nothing happens to him, then." She puffed out a sigh, and leaned her head back on the wall.

They fell into silence for a long time, their only conversation the unsynched rhythm of their breathing. Matt slept, eventually curling up tight into himself and pillowing his head on his arm, his back against the wall. Foggy kept one hand on his shoulder, his thumb rubbing in uneven circles, and drank water from the bottle that Matt had only sipped from.

He removed another tick mark from his mental inventory, and shut his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Breathe in, breathe out._  
>  Bush


	21. no-one would riot for less

 

Matt hadn't been asleep for three hours before he stirred, growling, pushing himself half-upright. Foggy let out a harsh sigh through his nose and shut his eyes. God, he'd give anything for another three hours. Couldn't be helped now. Karen shifted on Matt's other side, and he heard her let out a breath.

Foggy was trying not to let off how worried he was and how hard his heart was pounding as he reached over clumsily in the dark and found the back of Matt's neck with his fingers. His skin was cold. Colder than usual. "Where are they, buddy?"

It took him a minute to answer. His voice was low and dead and stabbing Foggy right in the fucking gut. "Tunnel. Two. A lot."

"A lot? More than two?"

"No. Two. Big."

Adults. Foggy's heart was pounding against the back of his tongue, burning and bitter. "Should we run?"

"Don't know this." Matt grunted, and Foggy felt him get his arms underneath him and struggle into a sitting position, leaning heavily against Foggy's side. He didn't weigh anything, like all the life had been drawn out of him.

Foggy opened his mouth to tell him to lie back down again, but Matt spoke first. "Light off."

"Yeah. It's off," he breathed.

Matt relaxed next to him, nearly imperceptible, and his shivering hand found the crook of Foggy's elbow, fingernails digging weakly against his sweater. There was the sound of moving fabric from Matt's other side-- Karen. He felt her movement through Matt's body, but didn't feel her touch. Matt relaxed a little bit more, so she'd probably put a hand on his back.

Desperate to have something in his mind other than gnawing anxiety and fear, Foggy let the thought come into his head for a half-second, calming and gentle: _Karen's touching him without being forced to, this is so good. I'm so proud of her--_

Then there was a wild squeal from the tunnel outside, and everything in his head shattered and disintegrated into something icy cold that squeezed all the breath out of his body. He curled his legs up reflexively; Matt huddled closer and Karen followed. Foggy reached behind Matt's back to grab her, any part of her he could reach-- her shoulder only, but he got his hand on it and rubbed with his thumb, trying to tell her it was going to be okay. Trying to tell both of them that they were all right.

He wondered briefly if Matt could detect lies in movement.

Another sound came from behind the door. Trilling, deeper and louder than the noises the last one had made. There was an echoing cry-- the second alien, beeping high-pitched and then wailing low and awful. Another trill, a rattle. They were talking to each other.

Their sounds only got louder and louder, until he wasn't sure how the aliens couldn't hear his heartbeat above it all. Matt moved closer, burying his face against Foggy's arm, curling his legs tightly against himself and going still, like he'd be safer that way. His breaths pushed through the worn fabric of Foggy's sweater, fast and shallow.

Foggy could hear gravel being scattered, now. Their steps were heavier, louder, but still without rhythm. They sounded goddamn enormous. He remembered the shelter, when they'd had an adult right on the ass of their truck, recalling its size and shape. And there were _two_ of them on the other side of the door. He gently removed his elbow from Matt's grip and dug his fingers into Matt's hair. There was damp warmth on his arm, leaking in through the fabric of his sweater-- Matt shifted to his side, where he burrowed in and shook against Foggy's ribs.

Foggy felt himself squeezing his eyes shut even in the pitch black of the maintenance room as the heavy steps drew nearer, and he felt his lips moving silently, _Just keep moving, just keep moving, nothing here, there is nothing here, just keep going. Please, God, let them pass us_. The gravel rattled and echoed through the tunnels like the sound of hailstones, the aliens' heavy footsteps like thunder. He was praying, fervent, praying to anyone who would listen, for the aliens to pass them like the storm had passed them, to leave them safe, to let them stay together just a little while longer.

The pounding of uneven footsteps slowed outside the door. Matt clung tighter, and Karen tighter to him. Foggy only had the ghost of Karen's shoulder and Matt's hair, but he twisted his fingers in the latter and shifted, burying his nose against his friend's skull. He smelled like death and dust. Foggy kept his eyes shut.

Wailing, low and weak. More chittering. The sounds like Morse code in fast forward, then in slow-motion, then distorted through speakers that were too loud. Foggy could smell them, he could fucking _smell_ them, burnt rubber and that stomach-churning acrid scent like stagnant piss.

There was a single slam against the maintenance door, and they all jumped, they all drew closer to one another until Foggy couldn't tell who was what. It didn't matter. All they were was one small pile of a dying species, cowering on the floor in the darkness of a fucking subway maintenance room.

Lowing and beeping, a soft trill-- more talking. One of them deeper than the other. More heavy steps, some of them moving away from the door. A heavy scrape, a high shriek like a thousand nails on a hundred chalkboards, then a slam like a clap of thunder as it hit the door again. He could hear the chair that Matt had placed under the doorknob skitter across the room. They all flinched again, cowered closer to each other.

Foggy couldn't believe the door was still holding after Karen had shot the lock off to get it open in the first place. He was going to vomit soon. They'd probably kill him before that, though.

A roar came, from further down the tunnel; Foggy couldn't tell which direction. It was a horrible noise, with a rattling echo that sounded like their truck's diesel engine, and he couldn't even tell if it was alien or feral. The two outside started chittering at each other, clicking and beeping, and then their feet were slamming onto the ground again and their noises started drawing away.

Matt made a soft sound next to him-- a strangled sob-- and clutched Foggy's elbow again, pushing himself in harder, closer. It took ages before he was able to speak, and it was only one broken word that sounded like two. "Sorry," he murmured.

"For what?" Foggy whispered back, pulling his elbow from Matt's hand again and turning all the way toward him. They were all shaking, Matt the hardest, so Foggy pulled him in tight, then brought Karen across the dark as well.

Her cold, wiry fingers found his, threaded through them, held tightly.

They were still alive. They were still okay.

"Didn't hear," Matt eventually answered, and Foggy could feel his breath, weak and warm against his neck. "Not wake."

"It's okay," Foggy breathed, and he heard Karen echo him. "You need sleep, Matt. You can't keep doing this."

"Have to." He leaned hard against Foggy for a long couple of moments, then made a low grunt and fought back to his feet. "Light," he said, just a bit louder. "Need go."

"God. Okay." Foggy stood up, listening to Karen fumble with the flashlight. Another few seconds and its pale yellow glow spread through the tiny space. He glanced around, checking everyone over as quickly as he could. Karen, pale and shaky, blinking against the light, looking tired and frightened but alive. And Matt, forcing himself back upright, trembling and weak and barely awake. Foggy grabbed his elbow, helped him the rest of the way up. He didn't weigh anything. "You okay, buddy?"

"No," Matt said, not even cognizant enough to form a lie about it. Foggy's stomach turned. "Need go," he repeated, handing Karen back her jacket-- _Foggy's_ jacket-- then moving across the room to gather their stuff.

Foggy cut him off before he could start grabbing things, and pushed only the curtain rod into his hands. "Just this. We can carry the rest of it."

He grunted, airy and soft, and slowly moved to lean against the rod, both hands clutching, his knuckles white. Foggy patted him on the shoulder and passed over to hand Karen her things, and he tried to fight back the cold worry that was turning his insides to slush. Totally fucking impossible. He'd give anything to not have to feel it.

"I'll take his bag," Karen said, pulling her own over her shoulders.

"No, I got it. Take my rifle." He handed it to her. "You're a better shot."

She sighed, but took it anyway, taking her pistol from behind her and handing it over, because neither of them should go defenseless. Karen was fucking smart. "I don't think it's gonna matter in the d--"

Matt made a hushing noise, and they both fell immediately silent. His head was tilting, eyes fixed. Nobody moved, both Karen and Foggy too afraid they would shatter his concentration. They stared at each other in the dim light, waiting, and Foggy could see the strain on Karen's face, the worry evident in her pinched eyebrows. He knew he looked exactly the same.

With a small sigh, Matt finally lifted his head and went to the door, fumbling for the knob. "'Kay," he said, and his voice was broken. "Need go."

The other two gave each other a nod, and followed him.

\---

He led them the way they'd been going in the first place. Low rumbling and clicking echoed down through the tunnels, and Foggy couldn't even tell what direction the noises were coming from. Matt moved robotically, with none of his usual grace, tripping on nothing and slowing down at random intervals. Foggy stayed next to him, ready to reach out and snatch an arm or a handful of jacket if his legs decided to stop working and pitch out from underneath him.

Foggy was shocked when Matt _didn't_ collapse, and instead kept moving, guiding them down the tunnel for at least an hour until another train loomed slowly out of the shadows like a ship coming out of a dark ocean mist. Foggy could still hear noises, low moaning sounds from afar that echoed themselves into phantom, supernatural whispers that held an almost physical presence in the darkness of the tunnel.

"Is it safe here?" Karen asked, as she hopped up to pull the train door open.

Matt just grunted weakly and leaned against the back of the train, clutching his curtain rod to his chest like a child's security object.

Karen sighed and climbed in, then turned and helped Foggy up inside. Just like Matt, she didn't look like she had much power to her from the outside, all sinew and bone. And just like Matt, her grip was strong, and despite her wiry arms she was able to pull him up with relative ease.

"Thanks," he mumbled, grabbing one of the train's hand-rails to steady himself.

"Yeah," she breathed, then turned to help Matt up. Foggy took the flashlight and pointed it down at him and he was just standing there, staring at nothing, swaying dangerously from side to side. Karen crouched down, face drawn and pale with worry. "Matt, come on."

He reacted sluggishly and reached for them; she leaned out the train and wrapped her fingers around his left wrist, tugging him up and into the door. Foggy came around to help but he was already inside, staggering to the first seat he could reach and collapsing onto it with a low whine.

"Try to sleep, buddy," Foggy said, moving to shut the train doors.

Matt's voice was like dust being swept through the air. "Can't," he mumbled, a frail protest, leaning the rod against his shoulder like he used to lean his cane. He couldn't even hold on with his left hand anymore, settling with tucking it up against his stomach. Even now, he was still listening, head twitching so harshly that it had to be causing him pain.

Foggy stood and stared, dumbly, until Karen's hand found his shoulder and tugged him a bit further down the train. She started speaking quietly, as if to hide it from Matt, when all three of them knew she couldn't. All three of them also knew he wasn't together enough to listen.

"We have to do something," she whispered, crossing her arms. In the faint light, her scar looked deeper, her eyes dark and worry-filled. "We have to get out of here."

"We have nowhere to go." He kept his voice low, and rubbed his own arm because he couldn't rub his face like he wanted to, not without pain. "I don't even know where we're at, Karen. We could be in fucking Manhattan for all I know."

"When we get to a station, we'll find the map. Figure out where the apartment is."

Foggy shook his head. "We can't go back there. Not until-- unless-- it's daylight. Big open area like Brooklyn with those things out there, I might as well shoot all of us in the head." A sigh shook out of his chest. "Wouldn't be as fast, though."

Karen nodded down the train. "And what about Matt? How long can he keep this up?"

"I don't know how he's still walking _now_ , Karen. I've never seen him do that for this long." Worry was crawling up the back of his throat as the dull burn of acid reflux. "I don't know what to do."

"Make him sleep."

"I did."

Karen worried at her bottom lip. "No, I mean... _make_ him sleep." She made a motion with her free hand, pushing her thumb through her middle and pointer fingers. Like she was pushing down the plunger of a syringe. Foggy blinked at them, dumbfounded. Was she being fucking serious?

Yeah, she was. He couldn't believe it. The chill of fear in his gut whirled into something confusingly hot. "Okay, that's--" Foggy coughed a hard scoff and shook his head. "That's the worst idea I've ever heard in my life."

She glared at him, looking wounded. "I'm trying to help, all right?" And yeah, he should have been grateful for that fact. Surprised. Proud.

All he felt was disgust. "I'm not sedating him." In the corner of his eye, down the shadowy length of the train car, he saw Matt lift his head. "We put him under, there goes our warning system. You know that's the only reason we're alive. Because we're moving before the fuckers get here."

Karen rocked once on her heels, and when she spoke, it was like the words physically pained her as they left her mouth. "I'm worried about him."

"We all are," Foggy breathed, shaking his head. "Drugs aren't going to help here. They're going to get us killed." He set the bags down on a nearby seat. "We'll rest here a while. Eat something. One step at a time. Okay?"

She made a noise that told him she didn't agree with this plan, but he didn't care. Foggy moved carefully down the train and back to where his friend was sitting. When he got within a few feet, Matt flinched, shifting away from him. Foggy stopped short, frowning.

"I'm not going to drug you, Matty."

"Don'want."

"I know you don't, that's why I'm not going to do it." Carefully, he moved over and sat next to his friend. The pistol Karen had given him was cold against his lower back. He spoke slowly, unsure how well he was being understood. "Matt, I need you to try to sleep, okay?"

"Can't."

"No, you can." Foggy was pretty sure Matt wasn't going to have a choice in the matter, judging by how much of a struggle it seemed to be for him to stay upright. Reaching over, Foggy gently pried the curtain rod out of Matt's good hand, turning to settle it against the seat on the other side of them. By the time he turned back, Matt was slumped over on the seat with his head resting in an uncomfortable spot between the bench and the railing.

Foggy sighed and reached over to tug him out from under the rail. "Over here, buddy." Matt didn't seem to want to sit up, so Foggy just tugged him down the bench before getting up and moving to sit by his head. "Rest."

Matt didn't respond with words, but he reached up with his shaking hand and grabbed a handful of Foggy's sweater with strengthless fingers. Yeah, he knew what this meant. _I'm here, you're here_. Foggy gently placed his hand over Matt's and stared out into space as his friend's breathing fell to a slow and even rhythm.

Karen sat across from them, the flashlight in her hands along with a bottle of water. She took the top off and drank from it, then held it out. Foggy took it and sipped at it, and for a while, he considered waking Matt up for a drink. He spent a while weighing in his head which was more necessary for Matt's health at the moment, and decided on sleep. Foggy set the bottle on the floor and settled back in, still holding that shivering hand.

He shut his eyes again, trying not to think, but did anyway, his mind churning and roiling like blackened ocean waves. Karen stayed silent across from him, and they both listened to the distant echoing noises that seemed to come from all directions at once.

It was a terrible idea to rest. Foggy knew this. His worry for Matt overtook everything else. He knew he'd regret it. He didn't care. Clutching Matt's hand tighter, he shifted minutely, and listened to his friend's breathing.

\---

The regret came just a short hour later.

There was no stirring, no _'Need go'_ s, no warning. Matt was still asleep, Foggy still in the same position, chewing the fingernails of his free hand down to nubs. He heard a scrape, and a sound like rain rattling on the roof of the apartment, and then a flash of blue outside the subway train as something rammed itself into the back end, making the whole car shake around them with a deafening roar of noise.

Karen yelped, high and short, and Foggy barely heard it past the sound the train was making. Matt was upright in half of a second with a startled snarl that was meshed into a low groan of _fucking agony_. It hurt Foggy to hear, but not as much as it hurt when an alien's claw burst through the glass window behind him, claws gashing across his shoulder before he could pull away and scrabble down to the floor. The smell of burnt fabric and skin hit him.

Matt was trying to shout an order, and it came out as nonsense-- his voice brought back to basics from exhaustion and panic. He made another noise, purely animal, a growl of frustration and rage, and pushed Karen to the floor next to Foggy. She was grappling at the flashlight, and when she turned it on, the alien wailed outside, almost like it was already in pain even though the light wasn't anywhere close to it.

Another window burst open and there was the alien's claws again, dragging across the bench, the wall, tearing furrows through everything. The stench of it filled the train as it made a noise, a loud, low wail that Foggy hadn't ever heard before. He didn't know what it meant, and didn't have time to try to figure it out before Matt was crouched down on the floor with them, pushing one of Foggy's shoulders toward the other side of the train.

A chuff and a snarl came from Matt's throat before he managed a terrified, "Run!"

Foggy grabbed his duffel bag-- the most important thing in the world right now, considering there was hot blood pouring down one of his arms-- and started moving, Karen in tow. They were halfway down the train when there was another low moaning sound, and a heavy thundering above them as the alien pulled itself onto the roof.

"Keep going, keep going!" Karen screamed, moving in a half-crouch to the next car. She shoved the door open with her shoulder as the alien's claws came through the roof, all goddamn thirty-six of them, ripping through the metal as it dug _through the train_ to get inside.

They tumbled into the next car and Matt turned back to get the train door shut. He closed them right as the alien dropped into the train, beeping and howling, the horrible noises that rattled in Foggy's skull when they were so close by. Karen was upright, grabbing at Matt's shoulders to get him away from the door, and yanked him back as the alien rammed them, then started thrashing around in the small space, digging its claws into the gap between the door to get to them. It clicked and wailed and Foggy could see its glow.

He heard someone shriek. It was probably himself, he thought, as Karen surged past him and Matt grabbed his wrist and yanked him along. They moved to the next car, through the doors, and into the third. How fucking long were subway trains, again? He'd never had to sprint through one before.

By the time they were in the third car, the alien was thrashing through the second one. It kept getting stopped up by the handrails and the poles. The noises it was making were getting deeper and far more pissed off. Foggy couldn't believe there was a fourth car still waiting for him, but he scrambled through the doors with everyone else, and yelped incomprehensibly when Matt spat out a snarl and turned back.

" _Fuck_ , no, Matt, we gotta go, what the _fuck_ are you--" he tried, grabbing at Matt's arm, but he just yanked it from Foggy's grip.

The machine rattled in Matt's chest as he moved back to the door they'd come from, lifting the curtain rod. Instead of attacking the alien with it or doing something else monumentally idiotic, he jammed it through the handles of the train door, then turned and scrambled back to the others.

"More," he said, unable to find the rest of the statement in his head.

It didn't matter. Foggy understood. More time to get the fuck out. "Keep going, we gotta keep moving," he said, grabbing Matt's arm, trying to get everyone to go faster. The fourth train was the last, and now their only option was to go back into the tunnel. That was the last thing Foggy wanted to do, but anything was better than waiting in the train for the alien to tear them all to pieces.

Karen shoved the side-door open and dropped down into the tunnel, Foggy and Matt following. They started down it at a sprint-- well, a sprint for Foggy was a light jog to Matt, but a light jog was about all Matt could muster out of himself. After a couple dozen feet, Karen stopped short, the gravel skittering around all over and sounding off in the darkness.

"Give me your bag," she ordered, her flashlight still in one hand.

"What? What for?!"

She growled and snatched it from his hand instead, throwing it to the floor. "Hold this," she ordered, shoving the flashlight into his hands. He fumbled, then pointed it at the bag as she ripped open the zipper. From inside, she pulled out a bottle of alcohol and a roll of gauze, and from her pocket, she pulled out a cigarette lighter.

"What the fuck are you doing?! We need to get the fuck out of here!" Foggy barked, and felt Matt hovering, panting for breath at his side.

"Covering our asses," Karen said, breathless, as she ripped the cap off of the alcohol and stuffed the gauze in through the neck of the bottle. She set it on the ground and lit the end of the gauze with the lighter, and as it caught fire, she picked up the whole thing and threw it down the tunnel. He removed them from his mental inventory. Foggy heard the bottle bounce once, and then flames erupted through the whole space, the brightness of them nearly blinding for a half-second.

Karen didn't give him time to observe. She shoved his bag back into his arms, took back the flashlight, and started moving. "Go. Go, go, go!"

They were running again, the heat of the makeshift firebomb at their backs. Foggy could hear the alien start to wail, and yeah, that was pain. It was definitely in pain. He hoped it was getting burnt to death. It deserved to be burnt to death.

Matt was heaving for air before a couple minutes had passed, but he kept going. In the bare flashes that Foggy could catch by chance with Karen flicking the flashlight all over the place, he could see the exhaustion on his face. He looked like he was going through the worst pain known to man. To him, it probably was.

Another half-hour of running, and they had to stop, Foggy wheezing over his knees and Karen panting and pacing and Matt leaning against the tunnel wall gasping for air.

"You think we got away from it?" Foggy asked between breaths.

"No, it's smarter than that," was Karen's answer as she wiped her face with the back of the hand holding the flashlight. "It'll go around, find another way in. I'm hoping we'll be... further away by then."

Foggy moved to Matt's side, fumbling around for his shoulder. He was shaking so hard, but still brought up his good hand and patted it clumsily against Foggy's. _I'm okay, I'm here, I'm okay_. "Did you see a station anywhere, Karen? A sign?"

"No, did you?"

"No." He sighed, keeping his hand on Matt's shoulder, ignoring how much the other man swayed and gasped for air and struggled to stay upright. "Fuck. We gotta get out of here."

Karen was suddenly in front of them with a half-bottle of water. "Just a sip. There's only one left after this."

Foggy took it, wanting so badly to drain the entire thing. His throat was dry from all the panting and God, he just wanted to sit for a while. He wasn't cut out for this stupid bullshit. He took a sip, and held it in his mouth as long as possible before swallowing it. "Matty, here," he said, and grabbed Matt's hand to guide it to the bottle.

Matt tried to say something and it wouldn't come out right, but, thank fucking _Christ_ , he accepted the bottle and took a drink out of it. He, too, looked like he wanted nothing more than to down it all, but he didn't. "Kar," he grunted, a single coughed-up syllable that Foggy barely recognized as an attempt at her name as Matt held the bottle back out.

To Foggy's shock, she took it, and drank out of it. Funny how desperation helped to break down those _'I'm not touching anything a feral has also touched'_ walls she had. He patted Matt's shoulder again, and this time it made the other man reach up with one hand and scrabble around Foggy's elbow for something to hold onto. Foggy steadied him. "Goddamn. You okay, buddy?"

Of course the answer was a faint, halting, "No."

And Foggy couldn't do jack shit about it. "...We'll be out of here soon, Matty. Stay with me, okay?" Words he'd said before, during plateaus, so many times before now. They still tasted awful when they left his mouth.

Matt grunted and tried, again, to say something, but all the words were just gone. God, he was in bad shape. Worse than Foggy had ever seen him before. Then, of course, because life was always out to get Matt Murdock and everyone that had ever known him, his head tilted, and that _look_ came over his face, the one that Foggy wished he wouldn't ever have to see again.

But there it was. He knew what to do. "Where are they, buddy?"

It took him a long few minutes to come up with the answer, and all he could do was point vaguely in the direction they'd come from.

Karen spoke first. "It got past the fire."

"Need," Matt breathed, and then couldn't find the second word. He grabbed Foggy's elbow and tugged him down the tunnel, legs shaky and weak. Another couple of steps and they finally went out from under him, but thank fuck Foggy was close; he managed to snatch Matt's upper arm, stopping him from pitching straight to the subway rail.

"Whoa, whoa, buddy. Okay, it's okay, I gotcha," Foggy hissed. His arm burned where he'd been hit-- Jesus, he hadn't even felt it until now-- and even Matt's slight weight became difficult to lift up.

Matt struggled, made a low, frustrated whine, then growled airily in the back of his throat, and fought back to his feet. He was breathing hard, but he steeled himself, and kept moving. Or tried. A whole ten feet. Eleven before he was trying to go down again.

Foggy kept a hand on Matt's elbow, but then Karen was there, grabbing his other one-- the left one-- and pulling him up.

"Come on," she said, and she actually sounded encouraging. "Matt, you gotta keep going. Come on."

Matt huffed at her, and tried to shake his head as if to toss off some kind of disorientation, but all he could create with his fucked body was a shuddering twitch. ""M Karen, m-move," he mumbled, every syllable a clear fucking battle in his head. A _war_.

"Yep, move. We're gonna move, Matt. Can you move for me?"

Foggy helped at Matt's other side, pushing him upright, nudging him along. He took another few steps and stopped, breaths shuddering in and out of him. No, he was done. Any further, and he was going to collapse, and he wouldn't be able to get back up again. His heart would go out and he would die, right there in the tunnel.

"Okay. It's okay, Matty," Foggy said, swallowing acid and worry, and took his bag off of his shoulder, handing it out to Karen. "You take this."

She slung it over her back wordlessly, watching with a silent, solemn stare as Foggy maneuvered Matt around, and then bent to one knee, positioning Matt onto his back. He'd done this before, too. Just not after the virus. "Hold onto me, buddy," he breathed, sighing as he felt the scrawny arms drape loosely around his neck. One of them trembled harshly against his chin.

"You got him?" Karen asked, adjusting the shit on her shoulders. Foggy's rifle, two backpacks, and a duffel bag full of medical supplies. She was so strong.

Foggy didn't stare longer than he had to. "Yeah. Let's go."

They kept going, Foggy moving as quickly as he could. Matt was almost lighter than his goddamn rifle, and he could feel his friend's cold skin as he pressed his face to the back of Foggy's neck. There was also warmth, smearing along his hairline. Well, he knew it wasn't blood. There _was_ blood, though, not Matt's but his own, trailing down his arm, drying now. They didn't have time to worry about it.

"I've got you, bud. It's gonna be okay," he said, a clear lie that Matt didn't mention at all.

Karen kept the flashlight in her hand and her feet in step alongside him.

Foggy's legs were burning within five minutes, and ready to fall off within ten. After twenty, he was staggering and trying to hide it, but then the flashlight landed on the door to another maintenance room and he had to swallow his sob of relief. Instead, he spoke, shifting Matt's weight on his back.

"Is it okay to go in here, buddy?"

Matt whined, snuffled against the back of his neck. No answer.

Karen shook her head. "It'll have to do. Come on."

Getting up there was a goddamn circus, because Matt didn't want to go anywhere besides where he was, but they made it, and some sort of deity must have been smiling on them in that moment, because the door was unlocked. Karen tossed their things to the floor and then turned to help, easing Matt off of Foggy shoulders, guiding him with a strange gentleness to sit against the corner of the wall.

Foggy rolled his left arm in its socket because his right didn't want to move too well, and blinked slowly as Karen checked Matt over with the flashlight. She suddenly made a soft sound and leaned in closer, pulling back his jacket-- _her_ jacket. "Foggy, he's bleeding."

"It's not him, it's me."

She turned back to him, the worry on her face falling harder. "Jesus, seriously? Why didn't you say anything?"

"We were running."

"Still are," Karen sighed, then gestured toward a heavy desk that was pushed against one wall. "Okay, sit down there. Let me take a look, at least."

Foggy swallowed a whine of pain as he moved to do as asked, setting the pistol aside and trying to ignore the dim sight of Matt curled up into himself and stuffed into a corner in front of him. He clenched his jaw as Karen came around and pulled away a bit of his sweater, then swallowed again to try to mask any sort of pained noises trying to come out of him. It didn't work; he ended up gasping and groaning when Karen got the gashes completely uncovered. Maybe it was worse than he'd thought. He glared ahead of him, expecting Matt to lift his head at the noises Foggy was making, to focus, to come around with anxiety and fear on his face.

Instead, he slid bonelessly to the floor, curled up on his side, and didn't move.

Karen shifted. "...Matt? Are you okay?"

When she didn't get an answer, she blew out a sharp sigh and got down off the table. Foggy watched hazily, gritting his teeth hard around the throbbing in his shoulder. She knelt in front of the tiny, tucked-up figure, reaching out to touch his steady arm. "Matt."

All he gave was a vague mumble, burying his face in his arm.

"Let him sleep, Karen," Foggy said, trying very hard not to move his shoulder.

Frowning, she took Foggy's jacket off her shoulders and draped it over him, just like before, then straightened back up and made her way uneasily back over. Her face was stiff with worry. "Shouldn't he eat something?" she asked, sounding out of breath although she'd stopped running a while ago.

"Later. Not right now. Just... he just needs to rest."

She sat back down behind Foggy, going for his medical supplies again. Her warm fingers were shaking as they pressed gauze carefully around the wounds, and her voice shook just as badly as she asked, "Is he okay?"

Foggy flinched, but let her keep going. "No, he isn't. We need to get out of here." He didn't want to say the next words, but they were rattling around in his head and they burst out of him forcefully. "He's exhausted. It's going to kill him." The calm in his own voice startled him for a short moment, then he realized that it wasn't calm, it was just dead. "We can't keep going like this."

"I know," she whispered, then tapped a finger against his middle back. "These are pretty shallow. Mostly burns. I don't think you need stitches." Her next words were quieter, far more afraid. "He didn't notice you were bleeding? You know he goes apeshit over that sort of thing."

"Yeah. He can't focus. The smell... it probably didn't even enter his radar." Rolling his head side to side on his neck, he let out a soft sigh. "We're going to have to hole up here for a while. Let him rest as much as we can. He can't keep this up."

"What's gonna happen if he keeps pushing himself?" There was a squeaking noise of her boots on the floor behind him as she shifted and dug into his medical bag.

"I don't know." He knew. Of course he fucking knew. He didn't say it, wouldn't even think about it, and nobody called him out on the lie. "Unconsciousness. Like right now."

She shifted as if she were taking a look, although the flashlight was on Foggy's shoulder and not shining into the corner of the room. "What do we do?"

Foggy thought for a long moment as she grabbed an alcohol wipe and went to work cleaning out the wounds. She'd done this before. He was grateful for that. Not so much for the pain-- he couldn't even bite his tongue around it because he had to say something, had to come up with a plan. "...We're going to stay here as long as possible. Let him rest as long as possible. We'll lock the door," he tapped his fingers on the table he was sitting on, "push this against it. See how far that gets us."

"Do you think the storm's passed yet?"

"I don't know. I don't even know what time it--" he flinched as she swept the alcohol wipe through a deeper cut, "-- _is_. Goddamn."

She hissed. "Sorry." The rest of the cleaning was more gentle, more practiced. She had to have been studying the way he dressed Matt's wounds. At least Matt had his insane pain tolerance. Foggy wished he was that strong. And he wished he had half the bravery that Karen did.

He blew out a breath and rubbed at his eyes, dislodging the frustrated, fearful tears that were building there before they could fall out and land on his water-burnt skin.

Karen's hand found his unhurt shoulder, squeezed gently. "You okay?"

Foggy told her the truth. "No."

"Yeah, me either." Her breath came out as a slow, shaking sigh. "Should I wrap this?"

Foggy turned his head. "No, use the butterfly strips. I have more of those than I do gauze now. Use the ointment on the burns, okay?"

Karen hummed almost silently and went to work. Her hands were deft. It didn't take long before she was tugging his sweater back over his shoulder. "That's all I can do. Sorry I'm not that good at it."

"You're fine." He took back the pistol and slid carefully down to the floor. "Help me with the table?"

Worryingly, Matt didn't shift or respond to the sound of them pushing the table around and jamming it lengthwise against the door. On a normal day, he'd be flinching at the noise. Foggy's insides were twisted into knots that he didn't think would ever come undone.

As they finished barricading the door, he hurried back to Matt's side, trying to fight away the tears that wouldn't stop encroaching at the corners of his eyes. Matt was so still and silent that Foggy found himself reaching down to check his pulse-- rapid, but steady. He shook Matt's shoulder gently and didn't get a response. Jesus.

Foggy sat against the wall, tugging at his friend, pulling him up to rest halfway in his lap so he at least wasn't using the concrete floor as a pillow. "Here we go, buddy," he breathed, as Matt snorted weakly at being lifted and pawed at Foggy's knee. "Shh, just me. It's okay."

Karen hovered a few feet away, the flashlight in her hand, staring.

"Come sit," Foggy whispered, and she only hesitated for a second before moving to his other side. When she shut the flashlight off, the darkness swept in and it felt absolute, permanent. Like the light had never existed in the first place.

Then Karen's arm pressed against his, and he was grounded, and all he wanted to do was lean into it, fall into some kind of warmth and safety. Even if it was a lie, even if it only lasted a few seconds.

The thought bubbled up slowly, leaking through the cracks of the walls he'd been trying to build up around it since they'd left the apartment:

They were utterly fucking screwed. They were going to die down here.

Foggy swallowed sobs, blinked away tears, and kept it to himself. They sat there for a very long time. Until Foggy's eyes started getting heavy and he fell asleep with his head tilted against Karen's shoulder, her temple resting against his, and Matt half-curled in his lap. When a low wail bounced down the tunnel, he jolted slightly, and for a second he wished the world would just get it over with, just come in and kill them so he didn't have to sit and wait and guess as to when it was going to happen.

He had no idea how much time had passed. What time of day it was. That was more disorienting than the darkness of the room. Had they slept for minutes, or hours? Was it still daytime, or had they rested straight into the night? Had the day even been there to start with?

As the wailing grew louder, he shifted where he sat, wincing at the pain in ass and legs for being sedentary on fucking concrete for so long. Karen made a soft sound and lifted her head, and he heard her sighing quietly in the dark as she straightened up.

"What time is it?" she asked, voice slurred with sleep. Good. At least she'd gotten some rest, too.

"No idea."

Foggy chewed at his bottom lip, trying to edge himself out from underneath Matt so he could get up and, maybe, try to figure out what the fuck do to next. Matt grumbled the second he started getting picked up, and Foggy heard him snort and felt the low vibration of his growl as he woke up. Fuck.

"Go back to sleep, Matty," Foggy whispered, smoothing a thumb over his shoulder, trying to guide him back down.

Matt resisted, and shoved himself upright. "Hear them," he was already saying, voice low and weak, but-- Jesus, he didn't sound like he was dead anymore. He was talking more than one syllable at a time, and _moving_ , and that felt better than any sort of relief Foggy wanted for his goddamn shoulder. "Foggy. Hear them."

Light bloomed to Foggy's right as Karen found the flashlight and turned it on; he squinted as his eyes tried to adjust and Matt, obviously, didn't react. He only shifted backwards until he was leaning against the wall. His skin was still ghostly pale and his eyes were still bruised to shit, but he was keeping himself up of his own accord. Thank God.

"Should we stay here, Matt?" Foggy asked, blinking rapidly, willing his eyes to adjust faster.

He sat and stared at his friend for a long minute, and Karen crouched next to them and waited right alongside him. Both of them waiting patiently, hearts pounding in anticipation, waiting to hear if they had to make another panicked scramble through the subway tunnels.

Matt's eyebrows twitched, and there was the frustration, the pain-- and Foggy knew what he was going to say before he even opened his mouth. "Need go."

Yeah. It fucking figured.

They were moving quickly, a repeat of the last time, except Matt looked like he was moving a little faster, a little less clumsy. Karen shoved the table away from the door as Matt even grabbed his own backpack-- God knew how he figured out which one was his, probably the smell or feel of it-- and slung it over his shoulders before hovering at the maintenance room door with a tiny frown spreading across his features.

Foggy shouldered his duffel, and handed Karen the rifle. "Matt, what is it?"

He just shook his head as well as he could, that rough and jerky twitch sandwiched in between all the other twitches that were shooting through his frame. His voice was only a soft breath. "Foggy, don't... don't remember. This." He trailed his shaking fingers on the doorknob.

Foggy kept his volume at the same level. "You don't remember coming here?"

Matt looked worried. His head twitched, then twitched again in a shake. "No."

"Yeah, you wouldn't. You were in bad shape."

Matt huffed through his nose and it blew up a patch of condensation on the door. "Where?"

Foggy's frown started to mirror his friend's. "I don't know where we are."

Another loud huff.

"Is that okay? Are we... we aren't fucking lost, right?"

"No," Matt said, emphatically. "Not lost." His eyes darted around and his teeth were going to town on his bottom lip. He was lying. Oh, God.

It made Foggy's heart start that incessantly rapid beat again, almost painful against his throat and his ribcage. "Oh, Jesus, Matt. We _are_ lost." Christ, they could be fucking anywhere. The subway system wasn't exactly a point-A-to-point-B sort of thing. It was a sprawling series of tunnels, like a fucking spiderweb.

Matt's expression crumbled and he sighed heavily, leaning his forehead against the door. "Sorry. I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault, Matt--"

" _Is_ , Foggy, _it_ is," he growled, shivering and furious with himself, beyond frustrated and weighed down hard by the entire goddamn world. Tears were pooling in his eyes; he shut them and sighed, bouncing his forehead on the door. "Sorry."

"Jesus, Matt, get it through your head. This isn't your fucking fault!"

Matt just growled harder. "It-- Foggy-- it sss-- _ugh_." The words weren't there. They hadn't been there for a long time. He shook his head again, and the frustration on his face was very quickly turning to anger, that burning fury at his own broken mind.

Suddenly, there was Karen, stepping in between the two of them and shaking her head. "It's fine. Why are you freaking out? We'll find a station eventually. There'll be a map." She gave Foggy a glance, and patted Matt once on the shoulder. "Jesus, don't flip your shit. Just tell us where to go, Matt."

He didn't look very sure of himself, but he attempted a nod-- simply another twitch, the only difference being it was going in a different direction-- and wrapped the fingers of his good hand on the doorknob. When he opened the door, the smell swept in-- acrid and nauseating. Fucking aliens. But Matt half-leaned out the doorway, listening, and after a minute or so he gestured in the direction they'd come from. "There."

"Okay," Karen said, and patted his shoulder again-- twice that time. He flinched. So did she. But she continued speaking anyway. "Let's go."

\---

Things were going pretty smoothly until they came to a fork in the path. Matt stuttered to a stop before Foggy could even see it, and Karen sidled up next to them both, breathing evenly through her nose. Foggy was panting. He was not cut out for this shit.

Karen spoke first. "Where do we go, Matt?"

He bowed his twitching head and listened. Foggy was only able to see his silhouette through the yellow glow of the flashlight, hair in disarray and a bead of sweat dripping down off his nose.

Their world made their decision before Matt could. A rattling wail poured down the tunnel, bouncing off the concrete walls-- from the fork to the left, Foggy thought distantly, as Matt snatched his hand and pulled him down the fork to the right. He stumbled and hurried to keep up, trying not to trip on the rail, on the gravel, on the occasional corpse of someone who'd died long before they'd been down here.

Then, because life was out to get all goddamn three of them, he heard the worst noise that could have possibly been made that moment-- the sound of gravel shifting, being thrown in all directions. Heavy, arrhythmic footsteps. A low rattle and a high wail. He didn't know from where. It didn't fucking matter. They were dead.

Matt jerked him close, panting. "Run," he whined. "Run!"

Foggy's lungs were burning and his shoulder felt like it was going to fall off after a few minutes, but then-- but then there was something coming up to his right, and it made his heart surge in his chest. Light. Actual fucking light. A station. It was daytime, and they were at a station. He wanted to cry.

They got closer, and then he wanted to throw up.

The entrance had collapsed, probably ages ago, and the light coming through were only thin beams piercing through the space between crumpled concrete and twisted rebar. He searched and searched with his eyes but it didn't look like they'd be able to get out, and if they climbed up there, they'd be cornered, and then dead in a very short timespan.

There was something else, however-- another train, it looked like, but it was all the wrong shape, and it took Foggy until they were nearly on top of it to figure out it had derailed and crashed, all the cars pushed up together like refuse in an alley.

"Under," Matt ordered, breathless, taking Foggy's unhurt shoulder and shoving him toward the derailed train. "Here. Now!"

It was a tiny space, but they all got underneath it, Matt slipping in last and flattening himself against the rails. In the dim light, Foggy could see there might be enough space to wiggle beneath the train and continue down the tunnel, but then he froze up, because the alien came bounding into the station, trilling. Foggy could see one of its legs from his angle, but didn't dare look for too long, afraid that somehow it would know his eyes were on it. Karen was pressed against his side, her breaths rapid but silent against his ribs. They were all fighting not to make noise, he knew that, and he reached back carefully to touch her arm. To tell her he was here, and, well, pretty much just that, because he sure as hell couldn't promise anything.

The alien lowed, and beeped, hopping down into the tunnel. It couldn't be more than a hundred feet away, and the weight of it was shifting the gravel all over, creating a sound like raindrops that echoed along the curved concrete walls. Foggy stole another glance at it, and _fuck_. An adult. Fully grown, or near to it. He could see the size of it from where he was, at least as big as the train they were huddling underneath.

Yeah, they were fucked.

Another melodic wail, and it started stalking toward them. Matt shifted, pulling himself back, but there wasn't much room, and he ended up against Foggy's chest. He was shivering so fucking hard. Foggy raised his hand and rubbed it on Matt's shoulder, trying to tell him what he'd just told Karen. _I'm here. I'm here. We're together. At least we're together._

They'd been so goddamn _close_.

Matt tilted his head around, and his face was pale, still. His eyelids were fluttering, as if even now he was having trouble keeping himself awake. Foggy had never seen him look so strained, so stretched out, like a piano wire about to snap.

The alien wasn't far, now. Foggy's heart was trying to escape his throat and climb out onto the rail. _This is it_ , he thought. _We got pretty far, though, didn't we?_ He rubbed his thumb along Matt's shoulder and fought to keep his breathing quiet.

Then, Matt rolled his head in Foggy's direction. His face was still colorless, but there was something else there, now. Something that was hardened, darker than the tunnel they were trying to hide in. Foggy's heart started beating faster and he didn't even know it could go so fast without exploding.

Matt reached out carefully, brushing his fingertips over Foggy's arm, then ventured further and touched his duffel bag. The medical supplies. No, beyond that, underneath the bag. A piece of metal rebar.

Foggy grabbed Matt's arm, shaking his head sharply, not daring to speak.

With a silent huff, Matt pulled his arm away from Foggy's hand, and wrapped his fingers around the rebar. He was close enough now that Foggy could see every line of exhaustion on his forehead, every miniscule twitch that the virus had damned him with.

The alien wailed, moving a few steps closer. It fucking knew.

Matt moved closer, then pressed his temple against Foggy's and spoke in his ear. Barely a whisper, like all that time ago, that first encounter with an alien in an alley in the Kitchen, those first days after the sky was ripped apart. Foggy was brought back to that moment, that instant of terror when he knew he was going to lose Matt, and it compounded and became infinitely worse, and Foggy couldn't breathe, he couldn't--

"You run," Matt whispered in his ear, fractured and weak and so different from the man he used to be, but somehow also exactly the fucking same. "You. Karen. Run."

Foggy wanted to grab him and stop him, but there wasn't room. He wanted to scream, but he didn't have the air in his lungs. His fingers closed over Matt's wrist and he shook his head, hard. _Don't you dare, you asshole. Don't you fucking dare do this to me again_.

"Go away, Foggy."

Matt nudged their foreheads together for a long, winding second, a second that felt like an hour, then withdrew. The segment of rebar was in his hand, and he moved it carefully over the gravel, never making a sound.

Foggy could feel Karen twisting around behind him, breathing harder. She grabbed his hip and he couldn't do anything.

He couldn't do anything.

For a sharp and silent second, Matt stayed flattened underneath the train, and looked like he might be reconsidering whatever plan he had built up in his shattered mind, but then, of course, he moved. All at once, as graceful as always, rolling out from under the warped metal of the train's underside, leaping to his feet, and taking off at a flat sprint.

The alien reacted immediately with a deafening noise, that high chitter, the rattling war-drum of the hunt that Foggy had heard before but never wanted to hear again. He was staring-- he couldn't turn his eyes away, because he knew he was watching his best friend commit suicide right in front of him.

Matt rolled as the alien lunged and tore out at him, barely avoiding its claws, slipping underneath it and hurtling further down the tunnel. It hissed and shrieked, and swung again, but Matt was fucking _booking it_ , and it didn't get a hold on him. He was going to move out of the light soon, and another alien was going to come from the opposite side of the tunnel, and he was going to be torn to pieces, and Foggy was lying there fucking _watching_.

A cold hand nudged him, hard. Karen.

"We gotta go," she hissed. "This way." She tugged at his arm, got him moving. They'd have to squeeze under the wreck of the train, move some of the shit out of the way, but they could get to the other side. It'd be noisy, and draw attention, but--

There was a sharp blast of noise from down the tunnel, Matt's direction. Not an alien, but his whistle, the one that Karen had taught him, starting low but rising into a high-pitched noise that was a poor parody of the aliens and echoed by a furious, authentic, rattling trill. He was getting its attention. He was drawing it away.

Like the alpha in the Park, like the feral in the street. Putting himself up on a platter so that Foggy and Karen could skitter away beneath the table.

"Foggy, come _on_ ," Karen growled in his ear, yanking his arm harder. Pain bloomed up his shoulder and took his attention, although it shouldn't have, it shouldn't ever have.

It felt like years, but eventually he turned away, rolled toward her, and followed her beneath the train. The space was tiny and he couldn't believe he made it through, squeezing between sharp segments of metal and twisted plastic and out onto to the other side.

The whistle came to their ears again. A wail-- alien. Clicking-- alien. The noise of something scraping, the sound of gravel being scattered around. A shout, startled, pained-- Matt. It poured down toward them, the sound amplified by the tunnel, and Foggy could swear that it sounded like Matt was right next to him.

Except then Matt started screaming, high and sharp and tortured, and Foggy couldn't stop listening, couldn't stop trying to remember it, because it might be the last noise Matt ever made in his life. There was a snarl, more clicking, more scraping. Another scream that dug into his ears and echoed for an eternity.

A beep, a low and musical trill. A wild shriek of pain, as if from an animal.

Then, nothing.

Nothing but his own breathing, and Karen's breathing, a loud hiss in his ears. Her hands tugging at one of his arms. Pulling him to his feet, dragging him down the tunnel. He hung onto the silence, waiting for a noise, a growl, a yelp, but there wasn't anything. Foggy wanted to clutch the shadows with both hands, to throttle the sounds out of it, find where Matt was hiding and shake him free. There was still nothing.

Karen was bodily moving him now, her hands strong, stronger than anyone he would ever know. She pulled him down the tunnel for what felt like miles and miles, then up onto a walkway, into another train. He wasn't even looking at anything, wasn't watching where his feet were going; he tripped on something and it took him a moment to realize it was his own ankle, but by then he was on his knees on the metal flooring, listening to the silence, listening and listening and praying and praying and _crying and screaming_ and then Karen was next to him, clamping a hand over his mouth so he could continue to live in the silence Matt left behind.

"Shh, Foggy, you need to be quiet, Foggy," she was whispering in his ear.

And he knew that. He knew he had to be quiet or they were both dead. All three of them would be dead in this filthy subway tunnel, in the stench of burnt rubber and wasted lives. Foggy felt his throat closing over the noises that were coming out of him, his chest shuddering and his shoulder only a distant blur of discomfort compared to everything else.

Karen guided him to a bench, sat him down, sidled next to him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, hissing in his ear, but he wasn't listening, he didn't want to know what she was saying because _it didn't fucking matter_.

He started to talk, a whisper only, and it sounded like he was shouting in the total silence that he'd been forced into.

"Matt killed himself, Karen, he killed himself--"

"Shut up. It's okay. It's going to be okay."

"Why did he do that, Karen?"

"Shh. Foggy, you need to be quiet."

He did. He knew that. He knew, he knew, _he knew_ , but he couldn't stop, and he couldn't stop listening to that silence, straining for any sort of noise, footsteps on gravel, Matt coming back to him, because he always came back. He always fucking came back.

Karen was smoothing a hand over his hair, now, her other hand curled at the back of his neck, squeezing and rubbing with her thumb and even that was a reminder, because it was something he did for Matt, and she'd probably seen him do it a million times. But he leaned into it just like Matt always leaned into it, and buried his face in her neck, and clutched to her as tightly as he could because there was nothing else for him anymore.

There they sat, in that silence, and there were no sounds coming from anywhere. Karen turned the flashlight off that he hadn't even remembered her turning on and held him tightly, let him press his face into her neck, even when his own stupid snot and tears had soaked her shirt and she had to be uncomfortable. Even then, he didn't want to move.

But this was their lives, and their lives were not made for comfort. A sound came, and Foggy's heart leapt at first, but it was just a wail, and not anything human or feral or half-feral or half-human. Just the interlopers, the living silver that had done all of this to them, to their lives, to their home.

Karen was gentle when she pushed him away, and even more so when she placed her flashlight in Foggy's hand. "We need to go," she said, so clear and concise, and it made him miss that stuttering, slow speech. "Come on, Foggy. We'll find a station soon."

A station. Daylight. Freedom. Did he really deserve that?

She gave him his answer when she got to her feet, pulled him to his own, and led him down the train.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _It will kill you in the sunshine...or happily, in the dark._  
>  Bright Eyes


	22. voodoo (side: foggy)

 

Matt wasn't coming back. Foggy couldn't think about anything else.

His feet echoed through the train as he moved wordlessly through it. The tunnel awaited them after a few strides, black and endless and echoing with those low wails. Foggy listened, and listened, hoping for anything other than those hellish otherworldly noises, but heard nothing else. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to turn back. He wanted to scream and shout and punch Karen for dragging him along but he also wanted to sink into her arms and never fucking resurface.

Matt wasn't coming back.

He wasn't coming back, and Foggy couldn't hear anything human, except for his own breathing and Karen's. She hadn't talked for a while. She probably didn't have anything worthwhile to say.

They were separated from Matt, now, a derailed train between them and the direction he had gone in. A derailed train and any number of the sixteen aliens that they knew of. There were probably hundreds down here. Foggy didn't really give a shit. Matt wasn't coming back. And he wasn't doing this without Matt.

Foggy slowed to a stop in the tunnel, pulling his hand from Karen's, and said so.

She took another couple of steps before turning back, sighing. Her hand came up to rub her face and she stopped halfway, instead pushing her fingers through her hair with a wince. "You have to, Foggy."

He shook his head and could only repeat himself. "No. I'm not doing this without Matt."

Karen pressed back toward him, closing her fingers over his wrist. "No, you _have_ to. Foggy, come on." She pulled at him, tried to get him moving.

Foggy didn't budge. He dug his heels into the gravel underneath him, frowning, still shaking his head, dragging in sharp and trembling breaths that told him he was sobbing more than the heat prickling in his eyes did. "We have to go back for him." When his voice echoed back to him in the tunnel, he could hear it crumbling.

"We can't go back. They're down there."

"So is Matt."

She hissed out a couple of short breaths. "If we go back, they'll kill us."

Foggy didn't have a response that wasn't an iteration of _'I don't care'_ , so he clenched his jaw and kept glaring at her. He knew he was being irrational. This wasn't healthy or smart. He knew that. He _didn't care_. All he wanted was to have Matt back. Why did it have to be such a fucking battle every time? He was breathing harder, getting closer to hyperventilating.

"Foggy. Hey." Karen let go of his hand, then moved closer, rubbing his upper arm with a strange gentleness, while her voice was a harsh hiss that he didn't even want to listen to. But he did. He had to. "You can't start this shit now. He did that to protect you. To protect me. Turning around and getting yourself fucking killed is a poor goddamn way to repay him."

All Foggy could do was try to get it through to her. Try to make her see. "I can't do this without him," he repeated, once again. Why couldn't she understand that? Because the world had stolen that piece of her, that ability to hold onto someone? Ground it into the dust like everything else he'd known about her?

"You're going to have to. Foggy, we need to _go_."

There was a wail from further down the tunnel, louder than before. He flinched and took an instinctive step forward, and then Karen was yanking at him again, and he built momentum and started following. Slow and halting, but he was moving. He didn't want to. Every step down the tunnel took him further away from Matt. And each foot felt like a goddamn mile.

His mind fought with itself, warred over its own thoughts. Karen was right. If Matt was alive ( _he's not alive you fucking know he's not alive_ ) he was going to need Foggy, because there wasn't any way in hell a scream like the one Matt had made wasn't the result of a horrible wound ( _that alien tore him open and left him on the tunnel and you're leaving him there too, you know that, you know it!)_

Foggy didn't want to open his mouth and let the words out, but he did anyway. "Do you think he died, Karen?"

"I think we shouldn't think about it right now," she replied, voice taut.

"I can't stop."

"Well, try. And be quiet, okay, Foggy? They'll hear."

_I don't care!_ came that shout from the corner of his mind that was weeping, tearing itself apart around the huge quarry that had just been bored through it. Like a whole organ had been ripped out of him. God, it hurt. Foggy reached up to touch his shoulder, relishing in the flare of pain, the real pain, the physical pain, concentrating on it, letting it distract him. He started to wonder if Matt did the same thing, sometimes.

"Here," Karen whispered suddenly, "another train."

Foggy grunted. How many trains would they have to go through? How many would they have to crawl underneath? How many tunnels? How many twisted, silent hours in cramped maintenance rooms?

Another thousand, apparently, because Karen climbed inside, and then helped him up into it. He didn't sit, because he didn't really deserve to sit, so he leaned against a handrail like a disillusioned passenger, glaring at nothing but the shattered windows.

_(You let him kill himself.)_

Karen pulled out their last bottle of water, and took a sip. She offered it to him and he stared at it blankly for a long moment before she lowered her hand, and stuffed it back into her backpack.

Foggy let the silence build between them. It wasn't like he had anything worthwhile to say. He rubbed his thumb on the handrail, and stared out the window some more, breathing carefully so he wouldn't hyperventilate. He was already dizzy because he hadn't eaten, and he didn't think he wanted to eat anything ever again.

_(You let him kill himself.)_

He sighed and rubbed his forehead on the icy metal of the handrail. His thoughts swirled like smoke, choked like smog, overtook everything like a cold wind.

Karen's voice pierced through the mess. "You should sit down."

His voice was so dull and dead and automatic that he thought it might have come from someone else entirely. "No. I'm fine."

"You won't be any help to Matt if you push yourself like he did."

Foggy lifted his head and gave her a glare. Or tried to. He wasn't sure that his body was doing anything he was commanding it to do. "He's dead, Karen."

She frowned. "You don't know that."

Jesus, how had it come to a point where she was more optimistic than he was? He shook his head and rubbed his forehead on the handrail some more, as if the chill of the metal would erase the memory of all the times Matt had been there instead. Foggy fell back to repetition again, because he couldn't come up with any other argument. "I can't do this without him."

Karen pushed a breath through her nose. "Yeah, you can. You did it for three months at the shelter."

And why _wouldn't_ she bring that up? "That was different."

"How?"

"I'm not going to explain it." His voice was starting to rise and he had to beat it furiously back. There couldn't be any yelling, not here.  Not now.  Probably not for the rest of their lives.  They were going to die down here just like Matt had.  "You wouldn't understand."

Karen's expression fell, but her voice was still strong. The strongest part of her. "Matt would be so disappointed in you."

Foggy felt the anger flare up, too hot, melting away the ice at his chest. He almost shouted, fought it back at the last second, ending up grinding out words between his teeth. "You don't know fucking anything, Karen."

"I know more than you think."

"I don't g—"

Noises came down the tunnel again. For the first half-second it might have been an alien's trill, but then it went low, pained. It sounded _human_. Foggy's heart sped up, pushed the cold feeling back into place, and he swallowed and tried to breathe normally. It wasn't behind them, but in front of them, and he didn't know how Matt would have been able to get there, but it didn't matter. Foggy had the flashlight on and was moving without being consciously aware he was doing it, hurrying down the subway car and into the next before Karen could say anything or stop him.

It didn't seem to matter, because he heard her footsteps following him after a second. He ignored her, and tried to listen harder to the tunnel as he shoved the train door open and dropped himself down into the gravel.

Foggy opened his mouth to shout Matt's name, but his own brain stopped him in a panic. Violently, he fumbled around in his pocket, finding the whistle and blowing into it. All he heard was the noise of air over metal, as always. _Listen to this, Matt, please listen, I'm coming, I'm gonna help you, please be okay, please be alive._

There was another moaning sound, and it _had_ to be human, but it was so distorted by the echo through the tunnel. Half of his mind was telling him not to go, but the other half— the one with a huge hole torn through it— urged him forward, whispered memories into the limelight of his thoughts.

_(It's him. Find him. You can save him.)_

Karen was at his side, reaching for his shoulder. "Foggy, that could be anything."

"I don't care," he said, and started running. His duffel was heavy against his back, the strap digging in along the gashes on his shoulder, but he ignored it. Pain was secondary.

_(You can save him_.)

The noise came to his ears again. He forced himself into a sprint and Karen was still following him, their feet scattering gravel everywhere. A thought entered his mind and started to loop, incessant. _(It's Matt. It's Matt. It's Matt.)_

His flashlight's beam bounced around, found something. It was reflecting off of a surface of tarnished silver and iridescent plating. He ground to a hard, sudden stop.

The thoughts that he'd determined couldn't be changed switched over, turned to instinct and fear, and suddenly Matt was the furthest thing from his mind. All he knew, in that minute, was that there was an alien coming _directly at them_ , and Karen had caught up and was standing next to him with the rifle raised, panting hard. He yanked the pistol from behind him and held it in his other hand, even though it'd be useless against the fucking thing.

It made low noises, moans, so _fucking_ human, then soft clicking sounds. It moved slowly. Strangely. Not like any alien he'd ever seen before. Karen stood half in front of him, protecting him like Matt would protect both of them, the rifle lifted, the barrel waving unsteadily.

When it stumbled further into the faint cone of light that was shivering in Foggy's hand, Karen fired, and the tunnel was lit up three split-seconds at a time, interrupted only by the _snap_ of Karen's deft hands on the bolt-action as the muzzle flash spilled in lightning-strikes across the curving concrete walls. The alien _howled_ , it didn't shriek, its voice wasn't high and fast like all the others. In the flashes of light, he could see it stumble, see its claws dig into the gravel and toss it everywhere. It didn't leap forward to tear at them, wailing in fury, as Foggy expected; it _backed away_ , and that was something Foggy had never seen an alien do.

It seemed to startle Karen just as much, because she stopped firing, and although Foggy's ears were ringing from the gunshots, he could still hear her panting harshly, and then he heard the alien moan, low and deep, turning sluggishly away from them. Such a strange noise. They were all air raid sirens and punctured rubber, not idling engines and deep ocean creatures.

Something was wrong. Foggy took a step forward, proud at his own bravado, trying to get the weak glow of the flashlight on it. He could see the iridescent plates, blue and green and purple, and all six of its legs, stocky instead of long and spindly— it wasn't an adult, just a juvenile. No less of a threat.

That's what Foggy wanted to think, but as he inched closer, Karen following, he thought he could see something else, too. The alien was _limping_ , having a hard time keeping its left legs underneath it. There was silvery oil dripping from its back, glinting in the light.

With a rattling cry, it collapsed to the ground, right legs pitching out from underneath it as its left legs jerked around in random directions. It wasn't getting back up again, Foggy could tell that much, but he and Karen were being ballsy as fucking hell, getting this close while it was still living.

In the corner of his eye, he saw Karen lick her lips and move a little closer, her eyes bright but red-rimmed, and Foggy could see the worry on her face that was poorly masked by her fear and anger. She kept the rifle trained on it, and Foggy thought he saw her shake her head.

"Is it dying?" he asked.

Karen's lips pressed together for a second. As Foggy came a bit closer, inspecting the twitching form with the flashlight, she took a sharp breath. He figured it out in the same moment she did. The twitching it was doing, the shuddering, the distorted noises coming from it. He'd been in such close proximity to someone with the same symptoms that the movements were almost invisible to him.

To him, but _never_ to Karen.

"It's... I think it's... _feral_ ," she breathed.

Foggy couldn't say anything. The new information wormed its way into his thoughts, pushing out the delirious repetitions _(he's dead he's dead)_ and replacing them with something he could analyze. It took his attention and he let it. The guilt came anyway, because he couldn't lose focus, he'd forget, and he had to keep Matt in his head because Matt might never come back and Foggy's thoughts would be the only proof he'd ever existed. "They can turn feral?" He spoke haltingly, clinically, and moved a little bit closer, flicking the light around.

"I don't know." She shook her head again, then dropped the rifle, reaching out to snatch his arm. "Hey, no. Don't touch it."

The alien was struggling, now, to get its feet under it in order to get back up, but Karen had wounded it, badly. Up this close, Foggy could see scars, deep rivets through its plates and ridge and neck and legs. A massive set of gashes ran along its underbelly, or what he thought was the underbelly, but it was dribbling clots that looked like curdled mercury, thin strings of something he would never be able to identify. Inner organs. Whatever organs these bastards had inside of them. It was still glowing, that pale blue light flickering between its plates.

"Another alien attacked it," Karen said, pointing to the gashes, the viscera.

It moaned again as Karen took a step closer, right legs scrabbling. Foggy couldn't believe what he was seeing— it was trying to get away from her. It was afraid. He didn't even know they were capable of emotions, let alone one like _fear_.

"Is it dying?" he asked, voice cracking.

"Yeah," Karen said, keeping her distance from its claws. "It was dying before I shot it."

With a strange, awful noise, all rattle and moan like a creaking old ship, it did exactly that, giving one last half-audible beep before its legs curled stiffly up and it fell still. God, it smelled horrible. Rotten eggs and burnt plastic. It seemed to cling to the inside of Foggy's nose, replacing every other scent that he could have inhaled.

Karen clicked the safety catch on the side of the rifle. "I've never seen anything like this."

"I didn't know they could contract the virus," Foggy said, daring to edge a little closer, shining the light over the curled body. Like a dead insect. _(He's dead Matt's dead he's dead.)_ That clotted mess was still dripping out, pooling between the gravel. Strands of silver-gold thread and a viscous oil. "I thought they _brought_ it here."

"They did. I thought it was... I thought it was a mistake. They didn't intend for it. The poison, too."

Foggy sifted through his mental catalog. The shit he knew, medically. And it was so easy, so simple to push away the thoughts of his dying _(dead, you know he's dead)_ friend in order to get to it. "Viruses mutate, don't they?"

"Isn't that your area of expertise?"

"Not expertise."

"Whatever. You know more than I do."

"Yeah, that doesn't mean much," Foggy muttered, reaching out to nudge one of the alien's legs. It didn't budge, either too stiff or too heavy. A bit of both. They were goddamned heavy, he knew that much. Dense. "How would they even catch it? Do they even have a fucking..." he paused to find the word, and was reminded of Matt, and his stomach twisted, _(he's dead he's dead he's dead don't think about it don't think about it god dammit)_ "...circulatory system?"

"I think so. They bleed, don't they?"

"Might be more like... leakage." Like a cracked car engine. A dropped container of milk with a snap down the side. "It'd be pumping if it had a heart. It's not doing that."

There they were, studying a fucking alien body while Matt was off dead in some other tunnel and Foggy's insides were cold and crumbling apart in a poor imitation of the city above them. His shoulder burned, and for a second, he thought about the wounds, and his stomach turned.

He looked over at her again. "Is this the one that attacked us in the train?"

Karen shook her head. "I don't know." She looked at him, opening her mouth to say something like, "Why?" but then fell quiet for a moment.

Foggy stared at her, his breath speeding up uncontrollably.

Her face fell. Stiffened in alarm. "Oh, shit. The one that hit you."

"It's— no. It's not transmitted like that. I have to be bitten, remember?"

Karen started panting again even though she hadn't been running for a few minutes now. "I don't... don't think they have mouths." No, they didn't. Foggy had no idea how they even ate. _If_ they even ate.

The wounds tingled. It had to be all in his mind,  _(he's dead he's dead I'm infected I'm infected)_ some placebo effect caused by his own thoughts. This couldn't happen to them. Not right now. "Let's... let's not think about it, okay?" _(He's dead.)_ "We have to keep moving."

Karen stepped away from the body, sighing low and giving him a nod. He didn't look at it again as they continued down the now-silent tunnel.

_(He's dead._

_Don't think about it._

_I'm infected.)_

\---

"Another train," Karen mumbled, an hour or so later. An hour of blackness filled only with their breathing, and the sounds of their feet on the gravel, and the endless whirling chaos in his head that Foggy couldn't force back, clogging his brain, making him feel like he was pushing all of his thoughts through molasses. All of it repeated, all of it nearly nonsense at this point. Still a reminder.

He didn't say anything as they approached it, kept his mouth shut as Karen hopped inside, looked away from her face as she pulled him up with her. This train was filled with trash, old cardboard boxes, a sleeping bag with ancient bloodstains. Someone had lived here. Tried to live here.

Foggy moved to a bench and sat, curling his fingers around the back of his neck, tried not to imagine how it would feel to have a violent tremor ripping through his arm and hand. Or how it would feel to have a body with a tremor sitting next to him, leaning against his side for warmth.

Karen stayed quiet. She'd attempted to speak to him a few times as they walked, and he'd walled her off when he knew he shouldn't have, and hated himself for it. He should have been proud that she was trying to say things, trying to connect. The emotions just weren't in him anymore. Nothing was, really, except maybe the virus.

He gagged at the thought, but didn't vomit, because there was nothing there to vomit up. They were on the last bottle of water, now. The pistol was still against his back, and he was grateful. Like hell he was going to slowly die of dehydration. Or turn. He'd eat the pistol before he suffered the same fate as Matt.

_(Dead, dead, dead, infected, dead, infected.)_

Karen had taken his flashlight and was shuffling around the train car, picking through it, looking for anything useful. There wasn't much. Whoever had been here had taken everything with them when they left, or they'd died and someone else had picked it clean before they'd gotten here. Foggy stared at the seat next to him and let his eyes trace the nonsensical patterns left in the dust.

Something rattled in Karen's hand as she finally ventured back over to him. She handed it out and he looked at it, struggled to take in the image. A brown bottle with a faded label. He frowned when he wanted to smile. "Iodine tablets?"

"Yeah. They're for purifying water."

"I know what they're for."

She huffed. So much like Matt. _(Dead.)_ "It might keep us going a while longer."

He set them on the bench. "Now all we need is actual water."

"One step at a time. Isn't that what you said?"

Had he really said that? It felt like a week ago. He rubbed his face, again forgetting about the flaky irritation, but this time actually relishing in the pain instead of shying away from it.

Jesus, he was fucking worthless without Matt.

_(He's dead.)_

Foggy coughed out a noise, something like a sob that didn't want to come out as one, it wanted to come out as a scream, a shout, a deep noise of rage, a wail of terror, a howl of pain. He closed his mouth around it and blew out a breath, putting his face in his hands. His skin burned and he ignored it. His shoulder throbbed and he paid it no mind.

He would have been totally okay with staying like that until he died, because he knew it wouldn't be much longer, but then he heard Karen come close again, and sit next to him on the bench. She didn't do anything for a while, and as he was building up the strength to talk to her and tell her in the gentlest way possible to fuck off, she shifted, and settled an arm around his shoulders, and leaned her temple on his unhurt shoulder.

She spoke quietly. "I'm sorry, Foggy."

The tears again. Immediate. He hated them. He hated everything. Instead of lashing out, or shoving her away, he pushed out a heavy breath and said, haltingly, "I know."

Karen pulled her feet up onto the bench with her. He could feel her shaking, probably from the cold, because she hadn't shed a single tear over the fact that she'd had to listen to Matt's tortured shrieking in the tunnel. Maybe she felt relief. Maybe she was glad to not have to be near him anymore.

Then she dragged in a harsh, shaking breath, and he heard her cough out a noise that would have been a sob if she hadn't worked so hard to conceal it, and he knew. Foggy wanted so badly to feel proud for her, to be amazed at how far she'd come, but those feelings had long drowned in the black mess of his head, and he couldn't fish them out.

He wanted to tell her it would be okay. He really did. "We're going to die down here," is what he told her, voice weak, body weaker.

"I know," she breathed, against his neck.

"Why'd he do that, Karen?" he asked in a whisper.

It took her a second to hunt down what to say. In the end, it was a simple answer that they both knew. That they'd always known. "Because he's Matt."

And that was the bottom of it. He _was_ Matt, and he would always _be_ Matt, virus or no, aphasia or not. The same selfless son of a bitch that had collapsed, a liar, at Foggy's feet, half-dead and bleeding, two and a half years ago. Who died on a roof and came back broken but _better_ because all the pieces that had been snapped off of him were poisoned shards of a shit childhood and shittier life and all of the horrible people he'd allied himself to. The fucking idiot that never saw value in himself, not a single scrap of it, and continually offered himself up to the world instead of running and hiding from it like everyone else around him had.

_(Dead. Dead. Dead.)_

Foggy talked again. "What are we going to do?"

Karen sighed. Her fingers toyed with some loose thread against his collarbone. "We're... gonna keep going. Another station, remember? It's daylight. We can get out. Get to safety."

"...I don't want to," he said softly.

"Yeah, I know you don't," was her answer, and of course she knew. It wasn't too hard to put together, how worthless he was without his other half around. And Matt _was_ his other half, he _was_ , and Foggy would never be Foggy without his Matt, his broken bottle of hellfire and lightning to be kept at his side, steady and safe.

"I'm so tired, Karen."

"Yeah," she repeated, and didn't say anything else. She huddled close to him, eventually tugging her coat off and half-draping it over the both of them, and stayed.

His shoulder tingled and burned. He ignored it.

_(Dead.)_

\---

Something woke him up an indeterminate amount of time later, either an echo from the tunnels or an echo from the memories in his head, and it jolted him upright from the half-sleep he'd fallen into. Karen straightened up with a soft gasp, because she'd fallen asleep, too. All Foggy felt was revulsion and anger, at himself, falling into a slumber with his best friend dead and alone in some filthy, stinking tunnel.

Foggy blinked a few times and rubbed his face, pushed the tears out of his eyes that he didn't realize had been gathering there. It wasn't a surprise. He fumbled next to himself, where he'd left the flashlight, got a hand on it, turned it on. Everything looked the same.

"You hear something?" Karen asked, voice still half-asleep.

"...No. I don't think so." Just his stupid head, like it always was. Foggy shifted, feeling the dull burn in his lower back and legs from staying in the same position for God knew how long. His shoulder throbbed. He carefully plucked Karen's hand off of himself and sidled away from her before standing. His spine popped. Everything hurt. From without and within.

"Should we keep going?"

"Probably. Don't want to miss the daylight." Not that he deserved it.

Karen sighed, and he saw her nod from the corner of his eye. She stretched her arms and got up, grunting softly. Foggy gazed at her, dully, barely seeing her through the miasma of words and thoughts choking the back of his mind. Christ, what was she going to do without him? Go back to that empty shell? Turn back into Paige, the emotionless wreck that didn't even know how to smile? After all that work, all that effort, to drag herself back to Karen?

Something stirred in his gut and he tried to fight it. _(Dead.)_ But Karen wasn't. She was alive. Breathing, right there in front of him. And gazing at him with those sharp blue eyes, an expression on her face that she'd fought tooth and nail to have. A fight that _he'd_ brought to her, a fight that he'd spurred her to win. Foggy stared at her, silent, until she opened her mouth to speak to him.

"There's a little water left. Should we drink it?"

"No," he said, and his lips were numb. "Save it."

"Okay." She pushed her hands through her hair and picked at a reddened patch that had appeared across her face from the rain. "Which way?"

Foggy pointed in the direction they'd been going in when they'd arrived at the train. Karen nodded, and sighed, stepping over and giving him a pat on the shoulder. She lingered for a few too-long seconds before wandering back over and grabbing her things, then Foggy's duffel, offering it to him.

He took it, shouldered it silently, and started down the train. This one had a lot of cars. Over five, but he lost count around then. They all looked the same to him.

Together, they hopped down onto the rails, into the gravel. Karen patted his lower back, and turned half-toward him. The emotions spreading across her face were raw and too many to count. Trying so hard for him, trying to connect and give him something human to cling to.

"It's going to be okay," she said, and for a split-second, Foggy believed it.

Then he heard another noise, above them this time, a scrape, and then something cold and metal slammed into his cheek and he was face-first in the gravel, stunned. The flashlight jumped out of his hands and bounced to a stop a few feet away; the beam cut across the width of the tunnel to land on the curving concrete wall, illuminating nothing of worth. A short bark of a ruined voice gibbering nonsense sounded off in his ears, followed by a horrible, furious snarl, and then Karen, shouting in surprise and fear, and feet skittering over gravel.

"It's the pack!" he thought he heard her shout, but it was tough to figure out her words over the ringing in his ears and the awful fucking noises pouring from inhuman vocal cords and echoing through the tunnel.

Something slammed into his back, forcing a yelp of pain out of his lungs, and finally his body decided it wanted to move. He was scrabbling, trying to get to his feet. Warmth on his face, trailing down the curve of his jaw. He was dizzy. He didn't even know what the fuck had hit him; he couldn't see a goddamn thing. But he could move, and that was something— he felt the adrenaline surging in him and was distantly amused to find that he hadn't been living on adrenaline since they'd come down here.

Karen was hollering again, but he couldn't hear her words. Foggy pushed himself upright and immediately there were hands on him, cold and harsh and strong, scratching at his chest, trying to find his neck. He felt hot breath on his face, heard a loud snap a few inches from his nose as a set of teeth tried to bury themselves in it.

He jerked his head back on reflex, feeling himself shout more than he heard it. There were voices all around him, now, not human, mostly animal. Karen was screaming, high and sharp sounds of terror, and then the rifle went off, illuminating the space around them for a single fraction of a second. Foggy struggled to take in the image, to analyze it, to figure out what the fuck was happening and what the fuck he needed to do to keep Karen safe.

In the split-second of light, he saw them. Ferals. At least six of them, and another leaping down from the roof of the train. They'd snuck up on them while they rested in the train, Foggy realized, as he stumbled a retreat from the one that was clawing at him, fumbling for the pistol at his lower back. They knew Matt was gone. They had to know. Otherwise they'd never have attempted an attack.

_I am not good for them_ , wasn't that what Matt had said?

Matt wasn't there anymore.

Foggy's head pounded. He tried to focus. He _had_ to focus. But his mind was swimming and his ear fucking _hurt_ and he was so fucking _dizzy_. There was still warmth tracking down his face, pooling in his collarbone now. Blood. Had to be.

Then Karen started shrieking his name, and he centered himself on it, and clicked the safety off of the pistol. He shoved it forward until it punched the chest of the thing trying to tear him to pieces, and then he fired it twice. The recoil jerked through his arm just before he heard a howl of pain, and then the hands on him were gone, and something heavy fell to the ground at his feet.

The rifle again, to his left, and his ears popped and hissed while his eyes fought to take in all the information it could in the snapshot of light it had to work with. Two on the ground, five upright, crowding them in a semicircle like the pack of wolves that they were. Foggy swung the pistol around to the closest one and fired again, the muzzle flash lighting the animals' faces, all blood and filth and drool. He missed, of course, because he was panicking, and so was Karen, but he knew she was close by because he could hear her, very clearly. Shrieking.

"Foggy! Foggy, _run!"_

Run. Okay, yes, he could do that. He was sure he could do that. Foggy started to pull the trigger again but was cut off before he could squeeze off a shot, a pair of hands snatching his wrist and another attempting to yank the gun right the fuck out of his hand. He pulled the trigger in a panicked reflex of movement, and it went off in the wrong direction, ricocheting off of the metal of the train and off into the void of darkness, hitting nothing.

Another body behind him, scrabbling wildly at the back of his neck, and Foggy thrashed, shouting, letting go of the pistol and swiping out wildly to get away. He tripped on the subway rail and went sprawling, gravel digging into the palms of his hands.

_Survive, survive_ , the adrenaline roared, a living thing in his head, and he got to his feet, stumbling hard to the right until his arm brushed against the tunnel wall. Already he could hear one of the ferals closing back in on him. Gravel scattering, low chuffs of fury.

Karen was still screaming. "Run! _Run!"_

Foggy sucked in a breath, let it out as a sob, and _ran._

Keeping his hand on the wall, Foggy pushed himself away from the throng, the snapping, the snarling, Karen's shouts of fear. He went as fast as he could spurn himself, down the tunnel, in the direction that they'd been going in to start with.

A coward, right to the bitter fucking end.

His feet carried him more than his thoughts did, and he was still running, legs pumping, already aching. The howling and snarling was still carrying down to him, and Karen. And _Karen_ , furious and strong, so fucking strong, and the barking of the rifle as she fired it again and again and again.

Foggy ran. He only realized after a few long minutes that he no longer had his duffel bag, that he'd dropped it in the chaos. Another sob tried to come out of him but his panting broke it in half as he tried to get more air so he could move faster. The cold emptiness of his head, turned to wildfire from adrenaline, was now a white-hot fury. At himself.

Karen wasn't screaming anymore, but he could still hear the gunshots and the ferals. He kept going. Gravel scattered everywhere as he sprinted through the pitch darkness of the tunnel, one hand in front of him in an attempt to stop himself from going face-first into something.

He started to slow, because he couldn't breathe, couldn't drag enough air into his burning lungs. The warmth on his face was cooling, but the heat in his eyes was overtaking it. Foggy stumbled, and his hand scraped hard against the tunnel wall as he nearly crashed head-on into the concrete. He halted and leaned on it, heaving for breath, unable to hear anything past his pulse drumming in his ears and the air moving through his dry, whistling throat.

"Karen," he groaned between gasps, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Karen, I'm sorry."

No reply. He wasn't even sure he could hear her anymore, or the ferals. Jesus, he was dizzy. His head was spinning. He was going to pass out.

Panic took hold again as he realized what would happen if he did. All instinct, all thrumming adrenaline, he started moving again, stumbling down the tunnel, keeping one hand on the wall to anchor himself. No more gunshots, no more snarling. It was quiet. Foggy swallowed hard, his throat dry and burning, and kept moving. He had to keep moving. They were probably right behind him.

So he forced himself into movement, for what felt like another fifteen minutes or so, until the wall against his hand suddenly fell away. His palm landed on something flat and horizontal, and it took him far too long to realize from the noises his feet were making on the gravel that he'd reached another station.

No light, this time. He couldn't tell if it was night, or if this station's entrance had collapsed just like the last one. Foggy heaved himself clumsily onto the station floor, throwing himself onto his back and laying there for far too long as he tried to catch his breath. A rush of dizziness slammed into the back of his head when he rolled back over and he had to pause for a long moment to breathe and orient his body.

When he tried to stand, it hit him again, and he ended up staying on his knees, too afraid to get to his feet, terrified of losing consciousness out in the open. He crawled, like a wounded fucking animal, down the linoleum tile, seeking a wall, finding a door. His hands pushed clumsily all around it until he found a handle, turned it, shoved himself inside.

The smell hit him first— human waste. Ancient, rotting. A bathroom. He didn't care, just dragged his stupid worthless body past the door, kept moving until he hit another wall, then pushed himself into the corner.

He thought, _Karen, I'm so sorry, please be safe, please be okay. I'm sorry._

He thought, _Matt, I wish you were here, I'd do anything for you to be here. I'm sorry. I wish I could have been better for you._

He thought, _Maybe I should try to take a look at how wounded my face is_ , then tipped down to the tile, and was swallowed by that deep, dark hole he couldn't get out of.

\---

Foggy came to with a loud snort and a dry whine of pain, and there was light.

Not a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel light. Not even the weak buzz of a flashlight. It was a thin line, creeping in from underneath a door in front of him.

There was a taste in his mouth that he wasn't sure he'd ever experienced before. Metallic but bitter, incredibly bitter, and his tongue was dry, and his throat was whistling because there was no moisture to be found there. How long had it been since he'd drank water? He couldn't remember. That probably wasn't a good sign.

Where was Matt? Where was Karen? He tried to chain the events back together, found only a murky subway tunnel, small snippets of running through it, seeking safety.

Foggy got his hands under himself and pushed until he was half-upright. Everything tilted sharply to the left and he ended up falling right back down to his face with a low moan that reverberated through the tiny space he was inside.

He gave himself a minute and tried again, this time forcing his body into a sitting position. Carefully, he cast his hands around his limbs, finding nothing horrible, nothing missing. His fingers brushed over the gashes on his shoulder and the memory swept back in— the alien in the train, the infected alien in the tunnel.

_I'm infected_ , his mind hissed, like a reflex, something long-repeated.

No, he couldn't be. Aliens didn't transmit it. Only other humans. Foggy fought the voice down and moved his hands up to his own face. There was a wound, a deep cut and a hard knot on his left cheekbone. The skin was swollen, all the way up around his eye. His left ear was ringing, a phone that would never be answered.

Another memory. Karen screaming, ferals snarling, teeth in his face and hands on his chest, but he couldn't figure out if he'd been on the roof of an apartment or lost in a subway tunnel when it happened. Both, he decided, after another second of analyzing it. He'd ran, and—

Oh. He'd _ran._

_Coward coward coward coward_ , his mind snarled at him, and all at once, it came back. Of course, he'd fled, leaving Karen alone in the tunnel, _alone_ , but she'd told him to, she'd _told_ him to run, and he had, he'd followed her direction, she was the smartest of all of them and knew what she was doing.

_(Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, both of them, dead, Karen and Matt, they're dead and it's your fault it's your fault it's your fault it's your fault you killed them both—)_

Foggy felt the sob erupt, painful in his dry throat. Tears in his eyes, stinging so badly in his left one, the swollen one, the hard knot of what was likely a broken cheekbone, but he deserved it for what he'd done. He'd killed them both. They were gone and it was because of him.

Huffing out another harsh sob, he braced his hand on the wall and got to his feet, waiting a few minutes for the dizziness to pass. The light was still in front of him, the hazy line coming up underneath a door. A bathroom, that's what it was. The one he'd dragged himself into.

The last memory clicked itself into place but he didn't feel complete. He only felt empty.

Foggy sniffed, put a hand on the door, pulled it open. His eyes landed on the tile floor of a subway station, and he knew it was tile because he could see it, because there was light pouring in through the station entryway, the length of stairs leading up to the city. Daylight. Nothing blinding, nothing too bright, but bright enough to stun him because it was the most light he'd seen in days. He could tell it was still overcast outside, but it wasn't pitch-black, and that was something.

Light and freedom. Something he did not deserve.

He pushed out a breath and stepped toward it anyway, shaky on his feet, all his muscles weak and trembling. His head pounded behind his eyes and he swallowed hard as he beat back a wave of vertigo.

A clatter, and a snarl, and then a feral bounded down the stairs.

Foggy stumbled back with a shout, and his failing body was still creating adrenaline, pushing it through his veins and muscles to beat them into working order. He whirled to run, and the first thing his eyes landed on was a train that he hadn't noticed, still waiting for that last ride into the darkness. Lunging for it, he could hear the feral closing in with a loud growl that rattled through the yawning space.

He got to the train before the feral got to him, and slipped between the half-open doors, trying to shove them shut behind him. Foggy nearly got them there, but the feral was already trying to claw through them. Her face dragged across the stained window and he recognized her— she had a huge scar across one cheek. It was the feral Matt had allowed to live, the one he'd simply chased out of his territory instead of killing on the spot.

Foggy found himself inwardly cursing his dead— _dead dead dead dead dead—_ best friend as he scrambled down the length of the train, trying to get away from her. He had no weapons, no gun, nothing. Not even his duffel bag, which he could have swung to beat her back with.

Yes, he deserved this.

But his body kept moving, against his will, keeping itself alive as he kept retreating. She got through the door and stalked closer, growling, spittle dripping from her chin as she cornered him at the end of the train.

He didn't know what else to do, but his instincts did— his eyes found one of the train windows, busted out now, the glass shards long blown away by whatever other monsters had passed through. Foggy found himself scrambling out of the window, setting his feet on the bottom sill, grunting as he pulled himself up onto the train roof. There was nowhere to go from there, but at least he had high ground.

She came after him, snarling as she clambered out of the window, just like he had, her broken fingernails clawing along the roof. Foggy braced his hands on the train and kicked her right in the fucking face, sending her down, off of the train's window and yelping into the gravel.

High ground. This was good.

Foggy heaved for breath, strengthless, and got slowly back to his feet. God, he was going to pass out again. Not now, not now. No time. Survive, survive. _Dead, I'm sorry, dead._

More voices from the tunnel. A lot of them. His brain completed the thought for him. The wolves. The pack. They'd killed Karen, and they were coming for him now.

There was one big one, lanky and tall and athletic, and it came at the train at a flat sprint, leapt up against the back end, and climbed onto the roof with a grace and speed that Foggy thought was only reserved for Matt. It roared, victorious, and closed in.

So Foggy ran again, right down to the other end of the train. The edge came up fast. He didn't even pause to think about it. His boots hit the end of the train roof, and he leapt out into open air, a desperate play for safety, for time, just a little more time, that was all he wanted.

But it was too high a jump. He knew it was too high a jump. He knew while he was falling through the air that it was too high, too goddamn high, he wasn't Matt, he couldn't tuck and roll, too high—

Foggy landed hard on his right leg, and it snapped in two.

He tumbled face-first, rolled but not correctly, and he heard a high, sharp scream but knew that it was himself. Everything was fire. None of his limbs wanted to work, none of his thoughts wanted to do anything. All he knew was _painpainpainpainpain_ , and his shrieking throat was a weak flickering ache, raw behind a wall of total fucking agony.

"Oh God, oh God, oh _God_ ," he heard himself saying, turning his head to check the damage, and it was the slowest he'd ever moved in his life. There was blood. There were bones. He could see bones sticking out of his fucking leg. His body was still trying to drag itself to the safety it would never find.

_Compound fracture complete set with splint stop bleeding oh my God Jesus fucking Christ no no no no no no no no I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm sorry I'm sorry Matt I'm so fucking sorry—_

He panted into the dust and tasted the ash and heard the echo of himself in the tunnels and—

And out of the darkness, the wolves came. Snarling.

He panicked. He cried out. He screamed Matt's name because Matt would come, Matt would always come back to him, Matt would save him—

Something landed right fucking next to him, a hand on his back, and he curled up, shielding his head—

A roar, so goddamn close he could feel the heat of the body making it, so goddamn loud that _both_ his ears were ringing, and he heard them, the wolves, the ferals, snapping and snarling in response. The hand on his back was joined by another but it wasn't pushing him, it wasn't hurting him, nothing would ever hurt more than his leg in this tight and twisted moment he felt forever trapped in, and Foggy turned his head to look. His rattled, flame-ridden mind filled in the gaps before his eyes could.

_Matt_ , crouched over him like a shield, the growl in his chest the loudest that it had ever been. He was panting in exertion, teeth bared and bright. Alive, breathing. He was alive, he was okay. He came back. Matt came back for him. Foggy could see blood, feel the pain in Matt's wheezy breathing as he heaved for air. Something was wrong, he wasn't in good shape, but he was alive. Alive.

The ferals kept approaching. Matt straightened and stood over him, shuddering with instinct and anger, a howl leaping from his chest, deep and deafening, and Foggy had never heard such a noise, had never been privy to such fury before. Not even during a plateau. Not even in all the voices of all the other ferals he'd ever come across.

One of them slipped into the light of the station, and Matt took a step forward in response, purposeful, furious. Foggy was brought back to a roof, that one too-warm night when the virus finally consumed his friend. His leg, singing in the dark, yanked him back to the subway tunnel.

The feral roared, and Matt answered.

_"Mine!"_ It sounded like a fucking explosion. Foggy had heard it before. He was so glad, so glad and relieved and _fucking horrified_ to hear it again. He tried to talk, to tell Matt to stop, to pick him up and take him out of here, but his voice was weak, buried beneath the avalanche that his leg had become.

"Mine! _Mine! Mine!"_ His vocabulary had receded to that single word. Matt smelled the blood, this time. Matt smelled _Foggy's_ blood, sensed the break, probably felt the bones buzzing in the air, and it lit an inferno in him, it detonated an atomic bomb, and Foggy could see it from where he lay, blinding bright and all-consuming, and he heard a roar that felt like it had come from beyond time itself.

_Pain pain pain shock going into shock confusion dizziness nausea apply pressure apply pressure stop bleeding recovery position apply pressure—_

_Karen, Karen, Karen, help, Karen, please. I'm sorry. I'm_ sorry!

Matt was moving, a storm of light and noise, striking out and dancing away with that eerie grace he had. One of them got close enough to his side to grapple at his arm and he snapped at it, and it snapped back, grazing its teeth over his jaw. He lunged in close and responded in kind.

Matt had never actually bitten anything before.

He went for the throat. A predator. Teeth into flesh like needles into silk, and there was blood spurting everywhere, all down Matt's front, across his face, and he was still snapping and ripping and tearing, like the action of biting had unlocked a deep and horrible chasm within him, fingers scratching violently at the other animal's chest, drawing blood from all places. The feral howled and tried to fight back but Matt was stronger, he'd always been stronger; he twisted his head and something tore. He didn't even spit it out onto the floor, just kept going, his teeth red, and his mouth red, and his face _red_. Matt didn't stop until he'd bored a hole in the feral's neck and it was on the ground pouring itself into the gravel.

Blood dripped from his mouth that was not his own, spraying out onto the floor with every harsh huff that blew through his teeth. It was bright, so bright; it painted him a monster from a children's book. He turned back to the others, eyes fixed, and Foggy could hear the explosion, that _roar_ , and he'd never heard anything like it and knew he never would again. Matt's feet were steady as he moved to close the space between the ferals and him, a shadow drifting, dark and unshakable. He no longer tried to speak. He did not have the capacity to speak.

They came again, because they were stupid animals, but Matt was at the top of the food chain, the most intelligent animal there was. His hand was shuddering like never before, worthless. He howled again and the tunnel bounced it back to himself and then he roared; he was his own fucking symphony, a battle-song, and Foggy could hear nothing else.

One of them took its chance and leapt, going for his throat, but he slipped out of the way and swung out like a pistoned machine as it passed him. Foggy heard a crunching sound, faint but heavy, an echo of his leg; Matt had crushed its larynx. That would have been enough, but Matt followed through, grasping the feral's jaw with both hands and throwing it to the tunnel floor. It choked for breath and Matt drove his foot into the back of its skull, twice, splintering its snarl over the gravel.

He kept going. He grabbed another, snapped its neck. Threw another to the ground and tore out its throat with his bare fucking hands. Slammed another into a wall, grabbed a handful of its hair and drove its head onto the concrete until its skull spilled open. He kept going. Bones snapping like distant concussive blasts. Like war-drums. Shrieks of agony, a chorus for Matt's infinite song of sun-bright fury. He kept going.

Matt was made of blood and the blood was made of fire. He kept going.

Arms, legs, _snap snap, snap snap_. Teeth into skin, jaw tightening, ripping parts away and throwing them to the floor. Howling. Matt's was the only voice, now, the only source of sound in Foggy's deafening world.

Matt tore each and every one of them to pieces and scattered the shards over the third rail. It felt like it had taken eons. It felt like it had taken seconds. Foggy was stuck in the middle, heaving for breath in the dust and gathering only pain into his lungs. He stared, and Matt was standing in the center of the mess, heaving for air, and Foggy remembered a dusty alley, a quick upward climb to the very first plateau. Had Matt really come down from it at all? Or had it been this animal, this monster, that had returned, and tied itself to Foggy's waist?

He couldn't breathe.

And then Matt was stalking toward him, tattooed in blood and fury, a devil and a demon, lightning and hellfire broken from a bottle, and Foggy could hear Matt's growl, the deep and terrible machine, and he couldn't get away, he couldn't move—

He couldn't fucking _breathe—_

_Matty, Matty, please, please, help, I need help, I need_ —

He dug his fingers into the gravel and struggled, struggled with everything that was left in him, but it wasn't enough, and that long and endless dark was closing in on him and he couldn't stop it—

_Matty, please. Please don't—_

_Please don't hurt me—_


	23. voodoo (side: karen)

Karen was running, out of breath already, legs pumping, Foggy's duffel bag slapping against her shoulder. The flashlight bounced in her hand. They were the only things she'd had the alacrity to grab, and that was only after it'd caused her to nearly get dog-piled because she'd tripped on the duffel trying to lunge after Foggy. There was no light and she had no idea if she was going in the same direction he had, but a fifty-fifty chance of finding him was better than a hundred-percent chance of getting her neck bitten open.

At least she'd chosen the direction they'd come from. The comforting buzz of a more familiar space settled in her head. Even if she'd only been through once.

They were snarling and howling behind her; she was in a wind tunnel of roaring with noises that were trying to drag her bodily back. Physically, mentally. A muddy sink-hole in a blackened Park, hands on her body, both shivering and steady, snarls and growls all around her, in her ears, blood on her face—

No. No, she couldn't fall into that. She'd been so good for so long. There wasn't time for it. Not right now. Karen shook her head, blasted out another breath, sucked in a few more, and kept running.

"Foggy," she hissed, breathless, into the dark, flicking the light around. Nothing but an empty tunnel. Karen slowed to a stop, listening to them snarling behind her. Foggy couldn't have gone far, but he wasn't anywhere. She should have run into him by now. Fuck. Oh, God. Slowing to a stop, she tried to catch her breath, but couldn't.

She'd gone in the wrong direction.

_Alone_ , she thought, immediately. She was alone. Panic started clawing faster up her throat, harsh and burning like acid. No, she'd been alone before, she could be alone again, she'd be fine, she'd be _safe_ —

A shriek behind her, anger and fury, and Karen started running again.

She hated the subway. _Hated_ it. Whenever she saw a train, she remembered that first night, her endless scream, the terror that had reached into her chest with both hands, tearing Karen out of herself, then plunging back in and  _squeezing_ until she couldn't breathe. It was coming back now, slow but steady, a vice-grip around her heart and lungs. Karen just kept moving, because she could do that. She could force her body into movement even when her head didn't want to unfreeze.

The gravel crunched underneath her feet, and she concentrated on that sound, the echo it made all around her, instead of the distant howling and the drumming of her heart in her skull. Karen kept her eyes on the tunnel ahead, looking for— what? The alien that they'd killed. Some kind of waypoint, a mile marker in the endless swirls of dark they'd been forced down into.

It didn't appear, even though she was looking for it, straining her eyes to pick any kind of detail out. A flash of silver or the flicker of light off of a puddle of mercury. There was nothing, no sign of it. She knew she'd at least find the blood, or its version of blood. Had she taken a wrong turn? Had she slipped down a fork in the tunnel without realizing it?

She wanted out. She wanted _out_ of this goddamn mess, she wanted to see real light again, to breathe air that wasn't choked with the smell of burning rubber and the sharp tang that lingered on the back of her tongue like a brand. She wanted her friends back. And, God, she couldn't even recall when she'd started mentally referring to them as such. Her sharp and earnest teammate— friend, family, _brother_ — and his gentle and intelligent other half.

Karen felt ill. Foggy was probably dead. She hadn't heard him in a long time. He'd died just as his other half had, screaming and terrified in a subway tunnel. Within hours of each other. Karen couldn't even be surprised about that. She only wished that they could have been together when it happened.

Ages passed, and then the flashlight landed on a door. Maintenance. God, she'd been in so many of them. Just an endless sequence of trains and tunnels and tiny rooms. A cycle of memories clawing at the back of her head and sounds digging into her fucking ears. Out, out. She needed to get the fuck out.

Karen climbed up and pushed herself inside, sighing when she caught sight of a table near the door. Familiar. It was one they'd used earlier. The one where she'd cleaned Foggy's shoulder, the wound— the alien wound. Those hands around her insides clutched just a little bit tighter, pushing another microliter of air from her chest. What if he was infected? What were they going to—

_No. Stop_. She didn't have the time or strength to dwell on it.

How had she gotten here? What turn had she taken that had led her back to this damned hole in the wall? Traveling through the tunnels was the most disorienting thing she'd ever experienced. It felt like she was permanently going in circles, and now it was true. God, she didn't know anything about the goddamn subway. She'd rarely used it, back before the sky tore in half.

Karen shut the door and locked it, but was too afraid to push the table against it. She'd make far too much noise. Her hands burned without a weapon in them. There was her knife, at least, at the small of her back, where it always was. Otherwise, the only thing she had with her was Foggy's medical supplies.

She pushed herself into the far corner, the same one that Matt had collapsed into— it felt like years since that had happened, and it felt like it had been only moments ago— and set the duffel bag in front of her, pulling open the zipper, hoping that he had a pistol or something buried inside. Everything was organized neatly, even after it bouncing on her back for so long. The pill vials were collected into one big sealed Ziploc, all of them marked carefully with a Sharpie in Foggy's shitty handwriting. Looking at it made her feel sick.

Karen kept digging. An aluminum tin for tea; she opened it and found a bunch of rolled gauze, dry and probably sterile. A Band-Aid box packed with cotton swabs, and the vial of ketamine sheltered inside of it. He'd written Matt's dosages on the top of the box. There wasn't much of the drug left. She tried not to think about that, and put it aside. Next, a bundle wrapped in a blue rag and taped together— he'd scrawled an 'S' on the tape. Karen felt it carefully and found a shape like tweezers, and another like scissors. Surgical supplies.

"Why the fuck don't you have a weapon in here?" she hissed under her breath, to nobody, as she kept pawing through the stuff. The green spiral notebook was there, at the bottom, its edges and cover curled from constant use, a pen threaded through the wire that was holding it together. Karen didn't touch it. She didn't want to read it again.

More bandages, his suture kept in alcohol in a sealed vial, individually-wrapped syringes. Latex gloves, a piece of folded cardboard that she couldn't work out a use for, antiseptics, ACE bandages, and a fucking turkey baster. For some ridiculous reason, she was sure. Foggy always had one.

There wasn't anything else. Karen went through it all again, and still, nothing, and she gritted her teeth and clenched her jaw until it hurt so she wouldn't scream.

Alone, and without a gun. Without water, without food. The pressure in her chest tightened harshly. She pushed the duffel aside and pulled her knees up, trying to breathe slowly so she wouldn't panic. She _couldn't_ panic. If she let herself fall into that, she'd be dead.

Karen rubbed her face, and then kept it in her hands, furious at herself when she felt hot tears squeezing between her palms and her cheeks. She needed to get up, get moving. She needed to leave the subway. There just wasn't strength in her to do it. How could she leave them down here, after everything that had happened? How could she flee? They didn't deserve that.

For a long while she sat, carefully counting her breaths, ten seconds in, hold for five, ten seconds out. She didn't know if it would work or not, but slowly counting and holding them helped quiet her hammering heart to a dull shout, and made buzzing exhaustion flow through her limbs instead of the itch of anxiety. One step at a time. One step at a time. She could do it. Even alone. She'd fought so hard to be strong on her own. Just because she'd lost the only two good things in her life, it didn't mean hers was over.

She could get out. Get to Yonkers. They'd take her in. She'd be safe.

No, she had to find Foggy and Matt.

She had to be _safe_.

But she wouldn't be _safe_ if _they_ weren't safe. She knew that. But all she wanted was to kick herself, rage at her own incompetence for letting them in, for letting them see her— and for letting herself see them. She shouldn't have become dependent on them. She'd known better than that.

And she'd let it happen anyway. A few long minutes of stewing in this thought, and she came to the conclusion that she wouldn't have changed her decision for anything. She _had_ something, now, something that transformed her from that empty, broken woman without worth to a human being that fucking mattered. She had something that made her want to wake up in the morning.

It hurt, deep in her chest, when she realized that she needed them just as much as they needed her. Family. A home. Somewhere she belonged. Somewhere she finally, finally fit into, after two years of living on only a bare minimum of emotion and meaning.

The sob that broke from her chest was loud and echoed in the small space. She gasped, fought it down, kept it silent. Just another few minutes, and she'd get up, go back into the tunnel, start looking. They were out there. She could find them.

Without her even being consciously aware of it, her fingers had found the dog whistle still hanging around her neck and were fidgeting aimlessly with it. Karen lifted it to her lips but didn't blow into it. If Matt was dead, it'd be a worthless gesture, and she had no idea if the aliens would be able to hear it themselves.

She had to survive. Just like the last subway, years ago. Maybe, this time, if she worked hard enough, she could remain as Karen when she emerged from this awful shattered spiderweb of acrid scents and noises not from their world.

Something broke the silence of the tunnel. Gravel scattering. She flinched, scrambled to turn the flashlight off, then tucked her legs up tighter, trying to hide herself better in the tar-black darkness of the maintenance room. Her breath got all caught up in her lungs, and she froze up, listening. Footsteps, definitely, but not alien. Staggered, like a feral's. They slowed to a stop just outside. She heard the scrape of something climbing the ledge in front of maintenance room door, and bit down hard on the inside of her cheek. _Go away. Go away._

Then, a thump on the door, the locked doorknob jiggling. A low, pained whine, and— oh, God, she recognized it. Oh, Jesus. Karen scrambled to her feet, the quickest she thought she'd ever moved in her life, and went to the door, placing her hand on the knob. She could hear breathing. Ragged, labored breathing.

She felt her stomach turn. Her voice tasted like ash. "...Matt?"

The answer was slow, but familiar. Her heart surged. "Kar... Karen?"

She sobbed once, swallowed the noise of it, then panted as she unlocked the doorknob. He'd been leaning on the door, and crashed down on top of her when she tugged it open. One of his hands scrabbled at her chest. His breathing was so loud in her ears— sharp, uneven, whistling gasps.

"Come on," she said, grabbing one of his arms to pull him inside— it shivered, but she couldn't tell why. Karen shut the door and locked it again, feeling his slight weight crumple against her. His head tucked itself against her shoulder, twitching, and his wheezing whistled loud in her ear. She'd never heard him breathe like that before.

Karen started to whisper again, "Matt, you—" but he chuffed against the skin of her collarbone, that harsh noise blown over his teeth, and she knew that meant to be quiet.

When he spoke, it was like she was listening to glass shattering. He was trying to whisper, but she could hear the shaking pain in his voice that made it so much louder to her ears. "Need. Safe. Karen, need, safe, _hide_ ," was about all he could get out, the words falling in a weak hiss from his throat.

Hide. She thought she could manage that. Karen moved carefully, pulling him further into the room, until her back hit the wall, and then she sidled over and dropped the both of them into the corner. Matt was pawing at her arm for purchase, but never found it, and ended up dragging her down to the floor with him as he collapsed, both of their knees cracking painfully on the concrete.

A gurgling noise came from him, and a muffled wail of pain. "Sss, shh," he attempted, and failed. Jesus, his _breathing_. "Karen..."

Her hands found him in the dark again, her palm brushing over something warm and flaky— caked blood from somewhere, she couldn't tell what. It was hard to tell where all his limbs were, but one of his hands was grasping at her arm, and she just let him have it. His shaking hand. God, she didn't care.

He was alive, and she had tangible evidence of it— a body, warm but shuddering, a physical thing, something to hold onto. She had to swallow another sob— pure relief. It felt euphoric.

Matt tried to say something else and fumbled over his words. It sounded like he was trying to say 'silence' but all he could get out was the 's'. She understood, and squeezed his arm, trying to impart that. He shifted on the floor and pushed himself closer to her. His wheezing became the loudest thing in the room. Caught up with a faint, pained growl, it sounded like a damaged truck engine that wouldn't turn over.

Karen felt him flinch before she heard the noises— clicking and beeping in the tunnel. In the dark, he huddled closer to her, somehow both leaning on her for support and creating a shield out of himself to shelter her in case the alien broke through the door. He leaned his head against her shoulder, too weak to keep it up himself, but he didn't weigh much. She could feel him swallow, and muffle both his own whines and those strange growls as he tried to quiet his breathing.

The beeping got louder. Karen put her other hand on his chest, feeling it shudder for air, inconsistent. He'd broken something. He had to have broken something. Why else would he be breathing like that?

Then, of course, the sound of gravel scattering, the alien approaching. Matt was leaning all the way against her, now, the only support he had, and as she heard it passing by, she felt him— goddamn it— _hold his fucking breath_ so that it wouldn't hear his gasping.

They were locked, the both of them, into a smothered, endless moment, waiting for the creature outside to pass them, for the air to come back into the room, for the danger to leave them be. Just one more time. Karen felt him shivering, all over, ended up turning her head and pressing _her_ face to _his_ neck, and she could feel the tremor under his skin, smell the blood and sweat on him, that horrible burning scent of the fucking thing out in the tunnel.

One of his hands came up— the good one, she thought, but it didn't really matter, not anymore— and drew itself around her back, and he tugged her closer against him.

But the alien passed. It must have passed, because Matt relaxed a little against her, and dragged in a breath that sounded like it was being pulled through fucking sandpaper. It sounded like he was dying. Oh, God. He was dying.

Terror bubbled acidic at the back of her tongue. No. She couldn't lose them both. Not happening. She'd never leave the tunnels. She'd never see daylight again if she didn't have them at her side to enjoy the warmth of it with her. The thought terrified her with its honesty.

"Okay," she breathed, getting her hands on his shoulders, gently pushing him off of her. "Matt, can you sit? I need to get the flashlight."

"Sit," he echoed. "Yes." She heard him stumble, heard skin scrape against concrete and heard a low grunt bundled among his labored breaths as he got himself down to the floor. It didn't sound like he'd had much of a choice in the matter.

Karen got up, fumbling for the flashlight and steeling herself for what she was going to see when she turned it on. Images bloomed wildly in her head before the real ones came into focus before her. Intestines and blood and bones. Jack, dying on an infirmary table. Eric, twisted and dead. Her own blood pooling in the black filth of a muddy Park.

She swallowed and moved closer, heart hammering, terrified. God, she didn't even want to look. She didn't want to see it, whatever wound he had, and her unable to do anything about it because she wasn't Foggy. She wasn't a doctor.

She was barely anything at all. Blowing out a breath, she sucked it in slowly, and knelt down next to him.

Matt was leaning hard against the wall, using his hands on the floor to hold himself up. Blood across his face, down his neck. Soaked into his jacket. _Her_ jacket. Chest shuddering unevenly; every breath seemed to be a battle. He stared listlessly at the floor for a second, then lifted his chin in her direction, gasping, teeth bared but not in aggression. The stitches that Foggy had placed on his cheek had been ripped back open, but the blood had dried a long time ago.

"Hey," she breathed, sitting down in front of him, dragging the duffel over. Her stomach turned, but... but he was alive, and that was a start. That was something. She couldn't fucking believe he was there, living, in front of her. After facing down a fully-grown alien with only a piece of rebar.

To save _her._

"Foggy," he whined, as if just realizing the other man was missing from his side, and even in the sharp, pained tone she could hear the demand in the word, the worry. The _need_. "Foggy."

"He's not here, Matt. Hold still. I need to see."

He made a rattling gasping noise, either an attempt to douse a sob or a strangled whimper of pain. Or both. "Foggy," he repeated. It didn't sound like he could get anything else out, his shattered brain locking into it, the most important thing in his world. She'd heard it before, the babbling, the repetition. It wasn't a good sign. "Foggy."

She ignored it and leaned in closer, trying to find where he was wounded. His bad arm was curled around his side, and when she got within a half a foot with her hand reaching out, he attempted to shrink away— an injured, scared animal. All he had was the corner, and he'd already pushed himself back into it.

"Shh, shh, just let me see, okay? It's just me, Matt. It's Karen. I'm not gonna hurt you." She moved again, and his eyes were flitting around all over the place, frightened, but he allowed her in, and let her touch him, let her pull away his arm to check the damage.

No blood there. Karen felt her eyebrows knit, and adjusted the flashlight as she pulled up his jacket and hoodie. She had to take another breath. Even in the faint light, she could see the darkening bruise all across his right side.

"Jesus," she whispered.

He swallowed, and made a soft whimper in the back of his throat. "Foggy. Foggy."

"Foggy isn't here, Matt. You've just got me. Lie down. Let me see it," she said, a little impatiently, trying to guide him down to the floor. He fought for a half-second, grumbling, trying to get back up as if to seek out his friend, and then his strength gave out. It was just as horrifying to see as it had been earlier. He lay awkwardly down and huffed against the floor, his jaw jumping.

"Matt, you gotta stay down. Let me see, okay?"

"K— F—..." He couldn't get the words out, whatever they were. Her name, Foggy's name. It didn't matter. All of them devolved back into that awful half-whine-half-growl that made that pressure in her chest squeeze and twist.

"I have to look. Just let me see it, Matt."

He didn't answer, just kept breathing those short, ragged gasps into the floor, stirring up dust. Karen stopped waiting for a response and hitched up the hoodie a little more, swallowing reflexively at what she uncovered. Half of his goddamn body was bruised _black_. Jesus, what had actually _happened?_ Had that alien thrown him into a wall? It looked like he'd been hit by a truck and it sounded like he was—

No, no, no. That was _impossible_. He wasn't going to die. Not here. Not now. Not if she had anything to fucking say about it.

Karen swallowed again, and didn't touch him, afraid he'd fall apart in her hands if she did. "Matt, how many of your ribs are broken?"

His eyes rolled around; his lips moved soundlessly. "Fff," he started, after a minute, and took in a couple more short gasps of air. Still trying to repeat Foggy's name, like a prayer. "Fff," he grunted, then kicked out worthlessly with one leg as if he was trying to pick himself up with it. He finally found the word, but it wasn't what she was expecting. "F-four. Karen. Four."

Jesus. "What happened, Matt?"

Another age passed where he was looking for the words in his head. Karen set one of her hands down on his side— his skin was freezing— to try to feel for any breaks, but he twitched and whined and scrabbled at the floor. Anything he might have collected in his mouth fell away to that sharp animal noise of pain, and she flinched, jerking her hand back.

"N-not, Kar, Karen, off!" was what he managed to spit out, trying to drag himself away from her. He still only had the corner, and he was all the way in it now. Nowhere to go.

She retreated, afraid to corner him there and feed his panic. "Shh! Shh-shh," she whispered. "You need to be quiet. You know they're out there."

Thank God, that seemed to get through to him, because he bit the words and the whines out of his own mouth and stopped trying to flee. She'd couldn't recall seeing him so scared before. Except maybe in the back of the truck, after he'd fallen in the river. Jesus, she'd be terrified too, if she was him. Fuck that, she _was_ terrified.

"Matt." Her voice cracked. "Where else are you hurt?"

"Hurts," he said, and she wasn't sure if he was repeating her or attempting to divulge information.

Karen edged a little closer, lifting the flashlight again. There weren't any bones sticking out, no fresh blood dripping down his chest. Just bruising. The worst bruising she'd ever fucking seen. "I know it hurts. Can you tell me where exactly?"

He didn't respond. She reached out and touched his hand— the shaking one. "Matt. Listen to me. You need to tell me where you're hurt, so I can help." She wasn't as good as Foggy at this shit, and she never would be. She didn't care. Right now, she was all Matt had, and that might already be permanent. "Hey. Talk to me."

To her surprise, he lifted his hand, wrapped his weakened fingers around hers. She'd seen that before, too— a reflex, an instinct to go toward the source of warmth, of contact. Karen blew out a breath and took his hand, feeling the shuddering tremor against her palm. It was so strong, even when the rest of him was so weak. "Shh, hey, it's... it's just me. Karen."

"Karen," he echoed, and held her hand tighter. "Help."

"I'm going to. Tell me what to do, Matt."

He panted into the floor, swallowed hard a few times. "Not help," he managed, then rolled his eyes, probably for more than one reason, "break. Only break."

"How many?"

Clumsily, he pulled his hand from hers, gesturing to his injured side. "Four," he repeated.

Karen nodded. "What else?"

"No else," he told her, and let his hand drop to the floor. It took her only a few seconds to pick it back up again. "Inside." He swallowed. "Not... not good, inside."

No. Fuck, Christ, _no_. Why, why, _why_. "You're... you're bleeding inside?"

His eyebrows furrowed. "No. Yes. Don'know. This. Karen."

"How can you not know?" she asked, and her voice was tinged and blackened with desperation. Panic. If he was bleeding internally, there wasn't anything she could do, she knew that. Foggy probably wouldn't be able to do anything. She was already staring at a corpse.

Matt huffed once into the floor, stirring up more dust with his weak breath. "Don'know." He was too tired, too drained, too distracted, too hurt and too incomplete.

"I don't know what to do," she said, and had never felt more worthless in her life.

A low rumbling noise came out of him that she struggled to place. "Is... is okay. Don't know this. I don't know this." It was a laugh. The weakest, most humorless laugh she'd ever heard. He turned his hand over in hers, clasped her wrist with atrophied fingers. One of them still taped to another. The tape was black with filth now. "Foggy. I need."

"I don't know where he is, Matt."

"Hn." He shifted a little, winced hard, baring his teeth at the pain as if he could frighten it off. If only, if only. "Karen. I am. I need. Want." He wasn't making any sense. Karen didn't even have the heart to wish internally for her translator. Matt seemed to realize that he was just babbling nonsense, and reverted back to the word he knew the best. "Foggy. Foggy."

"It's just me."

He fell quiet for a minute, thinking, and then spoke in the smallest voice that she'd ever heard in her life. "He is... he is dead?"

She wanted so badly to lie to him, but he would know. He always did. "I don't know, Matt. We got separated. There were ferals, and..."

He huffed into the dust. Sniffed hard. She could hear the uneven hitch of sobbing that he was trying to douse, because he knew that the inconsistent breathing was going to hurt him even more. He didn't succeed. "Should," he breathed, his words garbled, "...should have. Kill. Kill them."

Karen let out a breath and it felt unfair that it should be so easy for her. She spoke softly, edging a little closer, still holding his freezing, shivering hand. "...I wondered that myself, Matt. Why you didn't kill them. Why you let them live." Idly, and for a reason she couldn't quite discern, she rubbed her other hand over the top of his, as if trying to warm a fragile animal in her palms.

Matt seemed to relax, just a little, at the contact. She kept doing it. He deserved it. "Do... do not. Want to. Kill. Kill them."

"They want to kill you."

It took another minute before he spoke again, lining up the words carefully through what had to be a blazing inferno of agony. "Don't want to... to kill."

Karen sighed. "You're..." she trailed off, frowning. This wasn't something that she did— talking to Matt. Especially when the subject was Matt himself. It took her a second to realize she was stumbling into it without a safety net, without Foggy to bail her out. She fought back her nervousness. The last thing Matt needed right now was for her to be nervous around him.

"Thirsty," he whispered.

"I know. Me too. I don't have any water."

Matt sighed. Acceptance. It wasn't fair. He sucked in a breath. "Keep... keep talk," he requested, softly, tugging at her hand. "Please."

He just wanted to hear her. To be comforted. Such a small thing, and he'd asked for it so timidly.

"Yeah. Yeah, Matt. I was, um... just gonna say, you're... you're..." She didn't even know what words she was looking for. They came out anyway, in an awkward tumble, because they were both awkward, and they both knew it. And it seemed that they both didn't care. "...You... you're not like any other feral. I've... I've killed... a lot of them."

"...Know that."

The next words tumbled out of her so quickly that there was no way she could stop them. "I'm sorry, Matt. For... for how I treated you." She couldn't let him die without knowing that. He didn't deserve to die still thinking she hated his fucking guts, because she didn't. She didn't. "The tranquilizer gun. I couldn't... I..."

His fingers squeezed hers; his shivering thumb ghosted in wide, uneven circles around the bone of her wrist. "It is okay. Karen. You d... did not. Mean." His breathing had slowed, but it didn't sound any less agonizing. He shifted again, biting back a sharp whine of pain, his other hand shivering over the concrete floor. God, he was trying to get closer to her. She didn't think about it, just set his hand down, and edged over to him. They met in the middle, without words, two lost and shattered lives clinging to what little they still had left in the world.

It was just as awkward as their speech, the way they curled up against each other; Matt with his temple resting on her hip, because it hurt too much to get up, one of Karen's arms draped over his back while the other rested on his upper arm. She couldn't tell which one, because he was still shaking all over.

"Any better?" she asked.

He just made a weak noise, and shifted his head from side-to-side, burrowing his nose against her shirt like it was his favorite spot between Foggy's shoulders. Karen stiffened; he seemed to realize what he was doing and stopped. He mumbled something under his breath, and dragged in a few whistling gasps before he lost the strength to keep his head up and just let it lay limp against her thigh. It still twitched.

Karen spoke up softly, moving her hand up to brush it over the back of his neck. He was so weak. Like he'd been sedated. "...Matt?"

"Mn?"

Her heart was pounding so hard that she felt dizzy. "...Are you going to die?"

His harsh breaths pushed warmth through the fabric of her pants. She couldn't see much of his face besides overcast shadows that she didn't know how to decipher. Matt shifted, whined, then brought his good hand up— how could he still be aware of that, even now?— and pushed his thumb over the back of the hand on his upper arm. He swallowed, and spoke like splintered glass.

"Karen. It hurts."

That wasn't an answer. Karen didn't think he had one. She turned her hand over so that she could go back to holding his. "There's got to be something we can do."

"Tired, Karen."

"I know you are." He always was, but she couldn't be sure what, exactly, he was tiring of. All of it, probably.

No, he wasn't allowed to give up. That wasn't him. Foggy would be so disappointed, just like Matt would have been in Foggy for the same thing. Karen took a breath, and patted his shoulder. "Hey, let's get up. Okay? I'm gonna..." she cast around with her other hand for the flashlight and the duffel bag, "...figure something out."

He grumbled. "Don't want."

"Don't care. Up." Channeling Foggy the best she could, Karen pulled her hand out of his and got it between his shoulders, trying to heave him into an upright position. It didn't take much. He weighed less than she did. "There. Can you sit up on your own?"

"Mngh," he huffed, pressing both palms flat to the floor to keep himself up. "Yes."

"Okay, good. Just stay there," she whispered, then went back to the duffel bag. She pawed through it, thinking about what would help the most. The big Ziploc had a bottle of Tylenol in it that she dug out and set aside. They still didn't have any water. Karen dug some more and found the ACE bandage. Maybe...

"Matt, would it help if I wrapped them?"

He just grunted.

She couldn't tell what it meant. "Your ribs. Can I wrap them up? Would that help?"

"Don'know," was the predictable answer. He swallowed, then made a monumental effort to turn around and face himself in her direction. His eyes were still and fixed, and she didn't know what to think about that, either. "Karen," he said, and then fell quiet.

It took her a minute of waiting before she spoke.  "Yeah?"

"You d... don't," he mumbled. "Have."

"Have what?"

He licked his lips, winced hard. "Help. Don't have to. Do _not_ have to."

Anger flared in her chest. It startled her. So did her own voice, when it hissed out of her, furious. "Shut up. Of course I have to. Don't start with that shit right now." They didn't have the time. Matt, _especially_ , did not have the time to argue with whether or not he deserved medical attention at the moment.

Matt bowed his head, huffed a sigh, and fell silent.

"Why do you do that? Why do you think you don't deserve it?"

He didn't answer.

Karen moved closer to him anyway, the ACE in her hand. "I'm going to wrap your ribs with this, okay? Can you hold still while I do that?"

"Yes," he said, faintly.

She sighed and scooted over to him. He tried to say something else, but it was all fractured and low and she couldn't pick anything out of the sounds he was making. "Your mumbles don't make any sense, Matt," she said, picking the two metal clasps off of the ACE and stretching the bandage experimentally. She'd placed these before, of course, just not on ribs. "Here," she said, and tapped his arm. "You gotta take your jacket and sweater off, okay?"

Matt just made another loud grunt, another nonsensical mumble as he did as asked, slowly, clenching his jaw and breathing harsh through the pain. When everything was in a pile in his lap, Karen came around to take a closer look. The bruising was all along his right side, and it looked like it was spreading from around rib four or five, she couldn't remember, Foggy had only shown her once. And yeah, the bones may have looked a little deformed, or maybe it was just the fact that she could still see every single one, scant muscle pulling over them as he hitched in those sharp, uneven breaths.

"Did you get thrown into something?" she asked, still building up the courage to touch him. "Or did the alien hit you there?"

He thought about it. She knew he did, because his eyes started twitching around. "Hit," he said, softly. "Fell down."

"Why didn't it kill you?"

"Run," he breathed, and wouldn't say anything else.

Karen listened to his silence— well, the silence from his voice, not his lungs— for a few minutes before steeling herself and moving forward with the ACE. She tapped his arm first, to tell him she was there, and God, she was so awkward, but she followed through with the gauze, pressing it as gently as she could to a place that looked a little less bruised. He hissed and growled but didn't fight it.

"Can you hold it down for me?" She took his hand and he did as asked, because he was a lot smarter than anyone besides Foggy gave him credit for. Which was a list of people that included only Karen. "Okay, I'm gonna wrap them as tight as I can. I think it'll... it'll help with the pain. It's going to hurt."

"Hurt already," Matt said to her, his voice as deadpan as her own had once been. He was trying to joke about it, she realized, as she started rolling the ACE over his ribs, across his back, then around the front of his chest. She didn't have the alacrity to joke back.

He started hissing out high, uncontrollable whines, but she tried her best to ignore them, and kept going. His shivering hand got a hold of the pile of fabric in his lap and squeezed, but his fingers were weak, and it didn't help much. She kept going, around and around, pulling it as tight as she dared, listening to make sure he was still able to take in air. By the end, he was shuddering more than shivering, sobbing more than whining.

Karen locked the gauze into place with the little bits of clawed metal, and frowned at her shit handiwork. It was better than no handiwork. "Is that any better?"

It took him a very long time to respond, and it was only after he'd wiped the dampness off of his face. His breaths still whistled but they did seem to come to him a bit easier, and it gave her a few degrees of relief. Not much, but some. "It is... is better, Karen."

"Good. That's good." Another few degrees. It felt like heaven.

He started fumbling with his sweater and she helped him get it back on, ignoring his grumbling mumbles like Foggy would ignore them. Matt made to pull the jacket back on by himself, then paused, and held it out to her instead.

She shook her head. "Put it on."

"...Is yours."

"Well, right now it's yours."

Matt's lips formed a small line. He reached out clumsily and tugged on her sleeve. "Want, um." She waited while he searched his head for what to say. "Sh... share. No, um." He started chewing on his bottom lip, frustrated, unable to find the words.

Karen hated seeing that frustration more than she hated seeing him in pain. The awareness that he was missing things, that there was a hole bored into him that could never be filled or fixed. She tried to bridge it, tried to cross the gap and meet him halfway like Foggy always, always did. "You... want me to wear them both?"

"N-no," he blurted, shaking his head with a twitch. "I want this." He tugged at her sleeve.

"You want to trade them?"

"Trade." He blinked slowly.

She explained automatically. "I give you the jacket I have, you give me the jacket you have."

Matt tried to nod, but just ended up twitching again. "Yes. Trade. I want to."

Well, that was simple enough. Was hers warmer? Not as warm? Was he sacrificing another goddamn thing for her when he'd given up nearly everything else already? Karen nodded and shucked the jacket off her shoulders, giving it to him while taking back her own. It smelled like burnt rubber and sweat and blood. She didn't care. It wasn't like hers would smell any better.

Matt pulled her jacket carefully onto his shoulders, bundling it around himself. It was quite a bit bigger, because it was Foggy's, she realized, slowly.

He'd wanted it because it was _Foggy's._

She watched as he tugged it as close around himself as he could get it, burying his face in it with a soft, nearly-silent whimper. In the anemic glow from the flashlight, she saw his expression crumble to pieces and heard him gasp out a sharp sob.

Karen didn't know what to do, so she just put her hands on the floor and shifted closer to him, laying an awkward arm on his shoulders. She expected him to shy away, like he usually did whenever they touched, whether it was accidental or not. Instead, he leaned into it, like she was Foggy and not the woman who'd treated him like shit for so long.

"Shh, shh," she hushed, and he turned, and burrowed his face in her neck. Karen stiffened up, heartbeat quickening. The tremor shook coldly against her skin, each new undulation winding those cold and dark hands in her chest tighter and tighter. His lips were against her neck, right above her jugular vein. The tremor rattled in her brain. What if he bit her? What if he did as instinct ordered and tore her throat open? Infected her? Oh, God, she'd been doing so well.

With a soft whine that told her he'd sensed her discomfort, Matt lifted himself up and away. It was so hesitant that he looked like a magnet breaking free from its earthly pull. "S... sorry," he said, and pushed himself back a bit at a time until he was leaning against the wall instead of on her.

Karen reached up to touch the spot where his cold skin had met hers, frowning at the feelings warring in her mind. Revulsion and sadness. Fear and relief. And anger, then _appreciation,_ at being able to recognize all of them.

"It's okay, Matt," she whispered, and moved to sit next to him. On his good side. She could do that, even while her brain thrashed and spasmed, throwing up memories, words, sensations, things that she never wanted to focus on ever again. No, she didn't have time for that.

"Scare you." His voice was very slow, and very soft, and it was filled with more sadness than she thought one person could carry. "I understand this."

"No, it's... it's not you." Wasn't it? If she'd been alone, sitting there in the dark without having to feel that tremor, without her brain locking onto it and telling her what happened the last time she'd felt one up so close, would she even be feeling the way she did? Of course it was his fault. But it _wasn't his fault_. None of it was. "It's okay," she repeated, and even _she_ could hear her own lie.

He huffed, and didn't comment on it. For a moment, he tried pulling his knees up to his chest, but it hurt too much, and he ended up angling his face away from her so she wouldn't see his teeth when he bared them at the agony. Matt ended up still leaning half his weight on his hands and half on the wall, breathing those short, ragged gasps into the air.

She didn't move closer to him, and he didn't move closer to her. They sat, mostly in silence, except for his breathing. The sound jounced around the room, so much louder without their voices to buffer it.

After a while, he gathered up the jacket again, burying his face in it. He started crying, and Karen was right back where she began, wanting to reach out but her body refusing to, because the bubbling black tar in her head had receded, and she knew if she touched him, it would move right back into high tide.

She spoke anyway, because if it was just words they wouldn't need to have physical contact. "I'm sorry, Matt."

"Not need sorry."

"Well, it's still there, anyway." Karen leaned her head into the wall, rubbing the back of her skull on the bricks. "I'm sorry," she said, again. "I didn't mean for any of this to happen, Matt."

"I know this." He sucked in a breath that rattled, swallowed so hard she could hear it. His good hand came up, rubbed the tears off of his face. The ripped stitches and the rain burns on his skin didn't seem to bother him. She suspected that there was far worse pain elsewhere, at the moment. "...Karen?"

"Yeah, Matt?"

"What... what we... we did. Do. What... _do_ we do? Foggy is dead?"

Karen listened, took the words in, sluggishly deciphered them. _What are we going to do if Foggy is dead?_ "I don't know, Matt. We need to get out of the subway, to start."

He spoke so slowly, hunting down each word individually. "Don't want to leave Foggy."

"I know you don't, but we need to get out of here, and if we don't, we'll all be dead."

"You dead, I don't want this."

"I know."

He sucked in a deeper breath that came out as a pained sound, high-pitched from the back of his throat. His good hand had come back around to shield his side, the injured ribs. Then, even slower than before, he said, "Karen. Tired."

"Yeah." It was a miracle he was this awake, and able to talk with any semblance of clarity. "You want to sleep?"

"No," was his immediate answer, a reflex. He seemed to think about it. "Yes."

"Well, yes or no?"

Matt chewed on his bottom lip, forced out a rumble of nonsense over his tongue.

"No mumbles."

"Not mumble."

Despite it all, she scoffed a rough laugh. "You're a master of mumbles. Don't lie about it, Matt." She tried so hard not to sound hurtful, disdainful.

Apparently, she didn't, because a fragile smile jumped momentarily across his face. "Never lie. Never mumble."

"Always mumble," she replied, and watched as he tried to ease himself down to the floor. Worry surged in her head— if he laid down, he might never get back up again. Memories followed them, hiding in worry's shadow. "Try to rest, okay, Mumbles?" The last word tumbled out of her mouth as, Jesus, a _nickname_ , before she could halt its advance.

He huffed. She didn't know what it meant. "Karen, yes."

\---

A jolt woke her from a light doze. Matt's hitching, wheezing breaths twisted the pressure in her intestines until she thought she'd become a statue. A growl, loud and furious, barely six inches from her ear, fired her brain into immediate overdrive.

Karen reared up, swung out on reflex, hit nothing but air, then a shoulder.

No, no. Not a feral. Just Matt. They were in the subway. He'd lain down next to her, pillowed his head on his arm, tried to rest despite the hellfire in his chest.

He wasn't sleeping anymore, and as she fumbled to get the flashlight back on, she saw him getting his hands underneath himself, pushing his uncooperative body into an upright position. His head was twitching rapidly, tilting around; his eyes were darting around just as fast. Oh, God, an alien. Of course an alien.

Karen swallowed, opened her mouth. "Do we ne—"

"Foggy," he said, sudden and loud, fingers clutching at the floor as he kept forcing himself up. There was a growl in his throat that could not be doused. "Foggy. Foggy. Foggy."

But there was something else in her chest now, surging against the pressure of anxiety, loosening that iron grip on her lungs and heart. "He's outside? He's nearb—"

Matt cut her off with a snarl, deep and guttural, _furious_ , and it stilled her to a harsh, terrified silence. She shrank back against the wall on reflex, against her will, and she dropped the flashlight and started scrabbling for the knife at her back before she could stop herself.

"Foggy," he repeated. His voice was getting louder and louder with each repetition. "Foggy. Foggy!"

With a hard grunt, he got himself back to his feet, and leaned hard against the maintenance room wall for a few seconds before shoving away from it. He staggered to the door, and Karen was on her feet without thinking about it, the flashlight back in her hand, the knife forgotten.

"Matt, no, you can't go out there!"

He ignored her and crashed into the door, scrabbling his hands along it until he found the doorknob. His clumsy fingers sought the lock; Karen got to him before he could find it, and grabbed one of his jacket sleeves, trying to get him to stop.

"You're hurt, you can't g—"

"Foggy!" he barked, then snarled, yanking his arm away from her.

For some reason, she was still trying to stop him, even though that _snarl_ made the pressure increase threefold, made that black tar of times long past bubble thick through her mind. Karen wrapped her hands around his elbow, tugging him away from the door.

Matt immediately turned on her, _turned on her_ , lashed out with his good arm in a short bark of fury, catching her in the shoulder, and she let go like he'd become pure fire and lightning and burned her from the inside out. In a haze, she saw him go back for the door, find the lock, pull it back.

"Foggy! Foggy! _Foggy!"_

The word became a snarl, a unique sound all its own, and then he tore the door open and was gone. All she heard was his huffing, labored gasps of air as he disappeared down the tunnel.

Karen stood stock-still, like that would save her from violence, a rodent playing dead to avoid a predator. Her breaths shuddered out of her. The dark tar in her head boiled hot, turned to pure panic, broke free from her mind and roared through her body, and then she couldn't breathe anymore. She felt the wall, distantly, as she stumbled back against it and then dropped to the floor, shaking like she'd never done before.

She brought her hands up to her face, feeling tingling along all her limbs. Feeling all the air gone from her body, her heart drumming in her head, the back of her throat, everywhere. A memory in her ears, roaring, and its chorus the fading echo of the real thing, fury spilling from Matt's body and into hers. Time was passing, either in rapid chunks of time or not at all. She couldn't tell.

_Just breathe_ , she tried to tell herself. _Just breathe, breathe, breathe, one, two, three, four, five, breathe, breathe_ , but it was all pointless noise in her head, silence compared to the memories, the roar, the rage. _No, breathe, just breathe, one two three four five breathe breathe breathe breathe—_

There was a sound, out in the tunnel. Not a roar, not a snarl. A shriek of pain. Not feral. Human. Foggy. It was Foggy. It had to be.

The pressing world shattered around her, and she was moving. Instinct. He was alive. In pain. Her numb and worthless hands found his duffel on the floor, lifted the flashlight back up, and then Karen was running again. Her feet slamming into the gravel felt so distant and unreal. There were breaths coming in and out of her again, whistling like Matt's, short and labored. Air, she needed air.

Gravel passed underneath her, the tunnel walls whipped past her. She was breathing again, it wasn't normal but she was breathing. Hurry, hurry. She had to hurry.

Howling poured down the tunnel like water in a pipe, and then roaring, and noises she had never heard before. Horrible sounds, shrieks of pain and bellows of rage. Echoing snaps that sounded like tree branches underfoot. Karen felt her body trying to stop, trying to get her to turn back, turn back, this was dangerous, this wasn't safe.

Foggy's voice again, a low, frightened wail. She'd never heard him make a sound like it before. The tar thrumming in her veins turned cold, sucked out the terror she had for herself and replaced it with pure panic for him. And that— she could work with that. Her body could work with that, and it did, speeding up, her muscles pumping, her lungs sucking in air.

Another cry of pain, nearly buried beneath the howling, but she wasn't listening to that. She focused only on the single human voice that her ears could find.

Light. Ahead. A station. Daylight, and a station. Her pounding heart tried to exit her body through her mouth, but she swallowed it down. Close, she was so close.

Karen stumbled into the light, felt the warmth of it on her skin. She jolted to a hard, hard stop.

The image in front of her came only in short bursts of information, an incomplete picture: Foggy curled on the ground, his leg in the wrong direction, blood everywhere, _parts_ everywhere, arms and viscera, pools of red, Foggy whimpering in agony, bones sticking out of his leg, blood _fucking everywhere_ , and in the center of the mess in front of them— in the center—

Matt, struggling for air, and every inch of him was drenched in red, red, _red_. Blood. Karen could tell it was not his own. It dripped from his hair, from his clothes, shook in droplets off of his left hand. His chest was straining for breath. He looked like a monster not born of their world. A noise came from him— that awful engine noise, not pain, not irritation, pure and blinding _fury_  that dug directly into her brain and flared like living fire through her nerves, filling her with a sudden, burning panic for both her and the man curled on the ground. She moved, got to Foggy's side, stood next to him, protectively.

Her heart hammered in her chest, faster and faster; her breathing mirrored it. She glanced over the bodies on the floor, _parts of bodies_ , the amount of blood splattered everywhere, Christ, she could see fucking _brains—_

Matt growled again, low and dangerous, and it poured down the tunnel, echoing and becoming so much more monstrous with the distortion. There was no expression on his face that she could see beneath the blood. He had never looked so wild. So feral. He moved with purpose, the growl rising into a gurgling snarl, and her brain told her everything she needed to know. It was only one thing, but it sang in her mind with a sudden and absolute truth, ushered by her past, by the memories thrashing in her head and sending freezing tremors through her body.

He was going to kill her.

She started to breathe harder. It took seconds to transform into a high and rapid pant. His head tilted as if he were listening to it. The memories clawed at the back of her head, shrieking. Mud and ash and pain. Hands all over her, scratching, seeking. A roar in her ears. Stabbing agony below her navel, endless, _endless._

"Matt, stay back," she whispered, so quiet she could barely hear it, but she knew he could. "Stay away."

He approached her instead, still growling. She couldn't see any of him beneath the veil of blood. She couldn't see anything but what he was— a feral. A feral, coming for her. Just like the last time. Just like every other time. No different.

Karen drew her knife, held it in front of her. The only weapon she had. The sound of metal sliding over metal clicked and echoed down the tunnel and it sounded like the snapping teeth that were reverberating in the back of her head. "Matt, _stop_ ," she said, a harsh and sharp order. Her hand was shaking. "Don't come closer."

He slowly halted. Blinked. Swayed slightly on his feet. His breaths were whistling out of him. He wasn't responding to her. There was something wrong.

No, no, _no_. A ruse. An act. Getting close to her so he could slip his hands around her throat and his teeth into her face and his— and his—

"Stay away," Karen breathed. "Stay away."

Matt blinked again, and his face was shifting beneath the blood, but she couldn't see anything beyond the reddened mask of instinct and fury that he'd branded himself with. He dredged up words, brought them to the surface, wrestled them weakly with his tongue. They came out as nonsense because ferals couldn't talk, all they did was destroy, rip and tear and—

He growled again, took another step, and then her life rewound itself, played itself over again, and even without the mud and trees all around her, everything she'd learned, all the steps she'd taken to find herself, even with all of that—

He was too close. He was only feet away. She swung out with the knife.

She didn't mean to hit him. She didn't _want_ to hit him. She knew that. But she knew she felt it, _heard_ it, the sound of metal sliding into flesh, because she was so used to it, so familiar with it. A noise came from Matt's throat like it'd been forcefully ripped out of him and he flinched backwards, stumbled, half-twisted, and dropped to his knees and one hand in the gravel, at her feet.

For a long moment, he didn't move, like he wasn't sure where the pain had come from. The second that he figured out where it had, his face crumpled, and she could see it, even under all that blood. A low wail came from his chest, and then another. "Karen," he sobbed out, complete bewilderment, and even though what he said was her name, it was so much more than that. It was confusion and terror and betrayal.

But it wasn't anger. There wasn't a scrap of it to be found.

Karen shuddered, and blinked, and everything around her seemed to shatter silently and then suddenly it was Matt on the ground in front of her, not a feral at all, she'd just fucking stabbed _Matt_ , the man who'd nearly died of exhaustion protecting her, her friend, her fucking  _brother_. She dropped the knife like it had come alive and bitten her, and moved to get to him—

"Oh, God," she heard herself say. "Oh, Jesus, Matt—"

He whined, sharp and sudden, scrabbling back from her, dropping himself low like a wounded animal. Because he _was_ a wounded animal, and she was the one who'd done it to him. He was clutching himself somewhere near his shoulder or arm, but she couldn't tell where he was bleeding, because he was covered in blood already. She didn't know where she'd hit him. It might have been his chest.

She was back in the Park again, in the mud and in the darkness, and Matt was shivering, turning his face up at her. All he was, all he added up to, was a deep and empty sadness beneath a blanket of drying red rage. A gentle and intelligent creature that had reached out and pulled her from that pit within herself without even being asked to. A man that had fought through a virus and lived, a man that always had an eager grin to share, a man that didn't deserve the body and the world that he was forced to live in.

And this time, he didn't even ask why she'd done it. He didn't say anything. Another low whimper came from his throat, and he pushed himself back to his feet, scrambling away from her, panting in fear. He shook his head jerkily, turned his face away so that she could not see it, and ran from her, and Foggy, and the life he'd worked so hard to take back from the virus that had destroyed it.

He was gone in seconds, into the darkness where he belonged. Karen stared, stared at the shadows and listened to the silence and slowly dropped to her knees, shaking. Both halves of her world just gone.

No. She still had Foggy, he was still alive, she could hear him breathing. She could save him, she could do something.

Karen got to her feet, stumbled to his side, knelt carefully next to him— there was so much _blood—_  and reached down, feeling his pulse, trying to do what he would do. She felt it— rapid, thready. He wasn't conscious, but his eyes were rolling beneath his eyelids, and he was making sharp sounds in his mouth. Her eyes trailed slowly down to his leg, halting at his knee, not wanting to go any further. She swallowed, steeled herself, forced her eyes to look, to take it in.

Bones sticking out of flesh, pale white. Two of them. His lower leg, a few inches below his knee. Both of the bones, sticking out as splinters like the remains of a shelter in a distant Park that they no longer lived in. Karen's stomach was roiling, her pain and thirst and hunger a distant, empty thing. She put a hand on Foggy's hip, and moved to turn him onto his back, because she had to get him out of here, out of the scattered remains of the pack that Matt had ripped to shreds.

Panic, in the back of her throat and all through her head; she swallowed once again, fought it down. Move, she had to move. She had to help.

Karen bent her head, looping one of Foggy's arms over her shoulders so she could lift him. As soon as she started getting him off of the gravel, he shouted in her ear, pain and panic.

"St— st'p," he wailed, his other hand clawing at her chest. "Stop!"

"It's just me," she said in his ear. Her voice was dead— dead _again—_  and she tried to tell herself that it was just calm. It didn't work. "It's Karen."

He heaved against her neck, a harsh gag that produced nothing, and then coughed, and whimpered. "It hurts," he told her, and she had no idea how conscious he was. If he even knew who she was. It didn't matter, she had to get him out. "God, it hurts, it _hurts!"_

"Shh, shut up, Foggy," she whispered, knowing he probably couldn't hear her. Karen grunted, hauled him up the rest of the way, turned her head around rapidly to figure out where to go. Station. Light. They had to stay in the light.

She moved carefully, dragging him to the lip of the station floor. He shouted and struggled the whole way, sobbed in pain, fought to be free of her hold, but she didn't let go. Like Matt, he didn't weigh all that much, and she managed to get him to the edge of the station floor, scattering gravel everywhere. There was blood dripping off of his leg, the unnatural twisted thing that didn't even look like it belonged to him anymore.

"Matt," he cried. "Matt, _help_ me!"

"He's not here. Just me," she said, and her life repeated itself again, this time more gently, but no less painfully. "I gotta get you up there, Foggy."

No answer. He was sobbing again, chest heaving.

Karen shifted on her feet, trying to figure out how to do it. Eventually, she just hauled him up over her shoulder, a fireman's carry, feeling her muscles strain and thrum in agony at the weight. She grunted and struggled but got him into the station floor, wincing as he dropped into a pile and banged his head on the tile.

"Sorry," she whispered, then turned back for the duffel bag. She regarded the knife for a long second, laying on the gravel, streaked with blood. Matt's face was in her mind's eye, terrified, confused. Her stomach heaved, but she bent and picked it up, sheathing it behind her.

She returned to Foggy and hauled herself up onto the station floor, then grabbed his arm again, lifted him up. He groaned and tried to fight, but there wasn't any strength in his muscles.

Karen moved toward the door to the station bathroom. Better than nothing. Better than a pitch-black maintenance room or a blood-splattered tunnel. Getting the door open was awkward, but she managed, and then set Foggy down carefully against the wall, careful not to let his twisted limb get stuck underneath him.

Panting, she sat down in front of him, feeling the breaths coming in and out of her chest. She tried to focus on that, on anything other than the bones and the blood, but it was fucking impossible. Her breaths started to hitch, and then they became wet, and then she was sobbing, high and loud, and she could hear it echoing all around them. She dropped her head in her hands and didn't even feel anger for the tears against her skin.

And she probably would have sat there and cried for the rest of her life, but then Foggy shifted, and moaned, and her sobbing abruptly stopped because there were far more important things than the emotions throbbing in her skull. She moved forward, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Don't move, Foggy."

His eyelids fluttered. He was so fucking pale. "Matt," he said.

"No, it's Karen."

Foggy dragged in a long, shaking breath, blinking rapidly. He was coming to. Thank God. He would know what to do. Foggy always knew what to do. He swallowed, and she could hear how dry his throat was. No water, no food, no weapons. _No no no, stop panicking_. She had to stay calm for him.

"Matt," he repeated, twisting one hand up in his pants.

"It's Karen." She moved closer, keeping her hand on his shoulder so he didn't try to get up or slide to the floor. "Foggy, I think... I think you broke your leg."

A cough came out of him that was twisted up with another groan. It was a laugh, distorted, empty. His voice shook out of his body. "...No shit."

Karen couldn't return his humor. She asked the most important question she had. "What do we do, Foggy?"

He shut his eyes. The pain on his expression turned his face to stone. He did not answer her question. Instead, and with a voice that sounded like the wind, he asked, "Did you see Matt?"

"No," she lied, immediately, because she knew he would not hear her heartbeat and demand she speak the truth. He didn't need to know. It would only freak him out, and he couldn't do that right now, not with the leg. She couldn't tell him that she'd fucking stabbed his best friend. _Killed_ his best friend. There were so many more things they had to focus on. Like staying alive. "Did _you_ see him?"

He took a few breaths before he answered. "No. No, I didn't." Something went unspoken in his voice, and neither of them pursued it.

She sank down on her haunches and tried to figure out what to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Never did I want to be here again...and I don't remember why I came._  
>  Godsmack


	24. corpse roads

After approximately thirty seconds of Karen sitting and staring and feeling worthless in the half-light of the bathroom, it ended up being Foggy who actually did something. It wasn't much, just as far as digging out some gauze and laying it over the wound, not even pressing down, and then he leaned his head back against the wall, gasping like it had been the most monumental task known to humankind. High, rattling breaths that reminded her of Matt's broken ribs. She'd never heard Foggy breathe like that, either.

She couldn't stop staring at it, the torn-up mess of his leg. The sharp edges of bones jutting out like teeth. One of his hands stayed clenched, white-knuckled, in the fabric of his pants; the other he used to hold himself up.

"I am pretty much f-fucked," he declared eventually, in a shivering, hitched voice. "I'm gonna die."

"No." Karen shook her head. "You aren't."

"Karen..." he paused, pushing out a breath between clenched lips and leaning his head back on the bathroom wall again. There was so much pain on his face, written into every stiffened muscle. He looked to be choosing his words very carefully, or at least thinking hard about them. "The... the only reason I'm still alive is that the bones didn't... sever an artery. That's the only reason why I can— I can talk right now." There was still blood, though, soaking his pants, but not nearly as much as there was splattered wantonly throughout the station. His eyes screwed shut, opened slowly, halfway. "The second we start... start fucking with it, we r-r-risk damaging it. The artery."

She felt colder than anything as she stared at the leg. "A tourniquet's supposed to help with that, isn't it?"

Foggy scoffed. "Stop-gap."

"Should I put one on now?"

He shook his head so slowly that it took a moment for her to realize he was doing it. "No. I don't have a... a severed artery... obviously. Putting one on now... it's not..." he sighed. "It doesn't fucking matter."

Karen frowned at his apparent indifference as to whether or not he fucking died. Died, and left her here. Alone. She couldn't _do that_. "We need to get out of here, Foggy." She looked over through the doorway at the station, the light coming in through the entrance. "It's daytime. We need to move while we still have light."

"Karen, you aren't... you aren't fucking listening to me."

"Because you aren't telling me what to do to help you!"

"There _isn't_ anything we can do!" His voice was a furious hiss, but his breaths were uneven, agonized. They reminded her of someone else's. "I don't know how—how—how more plainly to put that! I'm dead, Karen, all right? There's no point in dr-dragging me out of here, because I'm goi— going to die anyway!"

She shook her head again. "No, you aren't!"

"Jesus, it's like arguing with Matt." And, _oh_ , the pain that crossed his face when he said that name. It compounded above the agony already there, twisting his expression, making him unrecognizable.

So Karen took that path, because _something_ had to get through to him, and if it had to be tearing open the wound that Foggy became whenever Matt wasn't at his side, she would do it. She would do it to save him. "He'd say the same fucking thing if he was here."

"He's _not_ here, Karen, so what's your fucking point?"

She sighed, pushed a hand down her face. "No shit, he isn't here." Foggy might have actually been agreeable if he was. Karen's hand found the whistle around her neck, rolled it between her thumb and forefinger.

He looked over and saw it, and his expression went slack. Fear. "Don't use that," he said, his voice suddenly a lot stronger. An order. "Don't."

Something in Foggy's voice made her stare harder at him, made the thoughts churn more rapidly through her head. Karen caught his gaze, pain-filled and wet as it was, and held it. "You _did_ see him, didn't you?"

Even with his leg in the wrong direction in front of him, Foggy didn't back down from her stare. God, he was good at that. "Yeah, I saw him." He took a few breaths, trying to hold them up as walls to stop the low moans of pain that were suddenly trying to spill out of his chest. His skin was pale. " _Don't_ call him, Karen." And it was more a plea than she'd ever heard come from his voice.

She already knew the answer, but, "He did that, didn't he? In the tunnel? The bodies?"

Foggy sucked in an uneven breath, half a sob and half something else. He didn't break eye contact. "What do _you_ think?" he asked her, even though they both already knew the answer. "Karen," he said, taking another couple of breaths and swallowing the increasing frequency of pained groans trying to break out of him. "Did you see him?"

She couldn't tell him. Her breathing was mirroring his. In the back alleys of her mind, Matt's soft, bewildered voice repeated itself. _Karen. Karen._ He'd sounded so scared. _Karen._ Don't tell him. She couldn't tell Foggy what she'd done because he'd leave her, and she couldn't be alone. Not now. She never wanted to be alone again.

"No." And the lie was so easy to say. It came out of her without effort, like silk. She hated it. "I didn't see him."

For a minute, Foggy sat and breathed, made low noises, shifted minutely against the bathroom wall in agony. Tears were coming from his eyes, constant now. Silent. He grit his teeth before talking again. The words sounded like they hurt more than his leg. "Listen to me. Matt is not safe. Don't call him. I don't— I don't know what he'll do. You understand?"

_Karen. Karen. Karen._ "Yes," she said. A knife in her hand, her arm swinging out. A low cry of pain and shock. Gravel scattering as he dropped to the ground at her feet. It looped over and over and over. "I understand." Don't tell him. Don't tell him. Don't tell him.

"Good." He fell silent for a minute, trying to slow his breathing. It didn't help. His groans were getting louder and louder.

She swallowed, and started talking again, trying to sound stronger than she felt. "Can you tell me what to do now? Can you let me get you the fuck out of here?" And her voice shook, too, just like his, just like Matt's. All three of them broken to pieces like a pack of ferals on a subway rail.

Karen waited and waited for him to respond, but he just stared off into space, face collapsing and rebuilding itself over and over, a reflex from the agony that was thrumming through his body. He was pale, shivering. She pulled the medical duffel over and started digging through it. Her limited knowledge of first aid wasn't going to get them far, but it would be a start. If she didn't fuck it up like all those other times at the shelter.

And, God. The people she'd lost at the shelter because she wasn't good enough. She hadn't even cried for them then. She hadn't felt a goddamn thing. Now, sitting on her haunches with Foggy _dying_ in front of her, she wished she could have that back. Just for a minute. A shield for the sound of his groans and the way his voice shook out of him.

"I'm gonna..." she dug out the tea tin full of gauze, pulling it open. "I'm gonna wrap it. Is that okay? Should I do that?"

"Cut the..." he made a clumsy scissoring motion with his hand, then gestured at his leg.

Oh, God, right. Fuck, she was bad at this. Karen dug around in the bag for a pair of scissors, finding them near the bottom, in a Ziploc. She moved slowly, cutting away the soaked and filthy pants. The smell of rot and human waste was so strong in the bathroom that she couldn't tell if any of it was coming from him.

He hissed and flinched as she peeled the fabric of his pants away, revealing a clotted, bloody mess that she didn't want to see on anyone, let alone Foggy. God, the bones. Karen swallowed the acid crawling up her throat. "Jesus."

"I wish," he breathed.

A religion joke. He was making a fucking religion joke. Because he was fucking Foggy and he always made stupid, inappropriate jokes. Karen swallowed again and prayed that it wouldn't be the last one.

With the clothing cleared away, she could see the open wound a lot better. It didn't make it any easier to take in. "How did you..." she moved back to the gauze, "...how did this happen, Foggy?"

He shut his eyes tightly. "I fell. Off the train."

Oh, God. Running from those ferals. She could piece it together, now, in her head. Foggy falling off, breaking his leg. Matt hearing it while in the maintenance room with Karen, surging to life like the noise had electrocuted him. Coming to Foggy's aid to find the ferals. Tearing them apart like they deserved. Protection. He was protecting Foggy, and her, by extension. Of course he'd be growling and snarling afterward. He'd probably approached her for help. He'd probably been in pain, in _agony_ with his ribs. He'd just wanted help.

Instead, she'd stabbed him.

Karen shook her head hard, fought down a gag, spoke dully. "I guess those vitamins didn't have enough calcium."

Foggy made an abrupt coughing noise. It was trying to be a laugh. "You said... expired. I told you... tasted like ass," he mumbled, half-dreamily. Karen felt the twitch of a smile trying to get across her face. It was a good sign, wasn't it? That he was joking?

"Okay," she said. "I'm going to wrap it now. Okay?"

Foggy blinked slowly. "Yeah. St— stop the bleeding."

Karen tried to ignore the terror in his voice, but didn't. She took up the flashlight and nestled it in the space between her ear and shoulder. Her hands shook as she grabbed a square of gauze, so white and clean in the filthy space of the bathroom. Chewing on her tongue, she laid it down on the hole torn through his leg by his own bones, settled her palm lightly over it, pressed down as gently as she could.

He _screamed_ , and she'd never heard such a sound come out of him, and it was as if the noise of it turned into something physical, bolstered those hands clenching at her insides, strengthened the pressure and throttled the breath right out of her.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" she was crying, grabbing more gauze, watching the blood soak through all of it.

His voice came out of him in hitched and inconsistent bursts. "Karen— stop— it hurts— fucking— _Karen_ —" his hands scrabbled at hers, tried to get them off.

She tried to bat them away. "No, no, no, I need to—"

"Christ, don't push— don't push down!" he managed, every word chaperoned out of his throat by an awful gurgling cry of pain. "Fucking _Christ_ , stop!"

Karen had to stop, because she couldn't listen to his voice anymore, how it sounded like he was being physically strangled right in front of her. She moved her hands away, watching the blood bloom slowly through the gauze. Foggy leaned back against the wall again, chest heaving, tears rolling down his face.

"I'm sorry," she said. She didn't know what else to tell him. The tea tin was still in her lap and she ran a thumbnail along the lid, panting. It occurred to her that she was sobbing, too, and just then noticed it. The burn of her tears on her skin seemed a distant and immaterial thing. "Foggy, I'm s—"

"Don't," he ground out. "None of that— that shit. No time for it." He clenched his jaw so tightly she heard his teeth creak. His breathing wouldn't slow down. She'd never seen anyone so pale, except maybe Jack, all that time ago, dead on a metal table. Foggy swallowed, coughed, swallowed again. "I think I'm going into shock." His voice had changed. So calm and clinical that she couldn't believe it was his.

Her heart was trying to exit through her mouth and she had to speak around it. "What do I do?"

"You need to— clean it— first," he managed, through breaths that pushed so heavily through him that they had to be jostling his leg and making it worse. "The... you won't be able to set the— the—" he grunted and his eyelids fluttered shut, "—break. It's p..."

Karen waited for the rest of the sentence, but she was offered nothing else. "Foggy, what? It's what?"

He was shuddering, and shook his head once, apparently forgoing his current focus on whatever that was, and reeling back to the previous one. "It needs— needs to be— cl-cleaned."

"Yeah, I can do that. I can do that," she breathed, going back to the duffel bag. There was only half a bottle of alcohol— she'd thrown the full one in the tunnels to drive away that alien. Karen pulled it out anyway, swallowing. She shook it, tried to show it to him, but he was staring at the floor behind her with a distant, empty gaze and wouldn't look. "Foggy, this is all there is."

His eyes slid over slowly, danced around the bottle in her hands, then moved back to where they'd been. "Yeah. Fucking f-figures." He sniffed once and shook his head again. "Use it."

Karen stared at the bottle. "But this is all we have."

Foggy sighed. At least it tried to be a sigh. It was more like a series of sharp breaths that came out, rapid-fire, half-sobs and whines of pain. "Then don't use it."

"You have to pick one, Foggy, I can't make that decision."

He leaned his temple on the bathroom wall and shut his eyes. "You shouldn't have used that bottle in the tunnel," he said softly, then grit his teeth around a groan.

Karen dragged a hand down her face. It stung. "No fucking shit, I already put that together," she snapped, and immediately wanted to apologize, but didn't. "This is what we have right now, and that's what we need to work with. I'll... I can go look for more. Whatever. It doesn't matter."

"Damn fucking straight it doesn't matter."

Karen blew out a breath, put the bottle down on the floor, and scrubbed both her hands over her face. It still stung; she didn't care. Breathing hard, she took a long minute, listening to him gasping, listening to the silence of the station outside. A sob came out of her and she doused its echoes. She spoke slow and cautious, because she didn't even want an answer for what she was about to ask. "Are you... is this you giving up on me right now, Foggy?"

He grunted once. He sounded like Matt.

"You're a fucking hypocrite," she told him, through her hands.

Another grunt.

Karen took a breath, and then another, and another. Slow and even. She fought her heart out of her throat, tried to shove away the pressure in her chest. It did little to help, but it at least helped a little. She'd mastered it years ago. "No," she said, softly.

He finally spoke weakly on an outward breath. "No what?"

"No, you don't get to do this," she said, and her voice was steadily rising. "You don't get to fucking give up like it's nothing. After all you've done to push me, and push Matt, and you're going to roll over like this? No. Absolutely fucking not." Karen dropped her hands from her face; Foggy was in the same position, eyes screwed shut, tears leaking out from them anyway. "How much you fight for us, to keep us alive, to keep us safe, and... this is what you're going to do for _yourself?_ Sit here and cry in a fucking bathroom until you die?"

Foggy turned his face away and wouldn't answer her.

The cold pressure in her chest loosened, turned wild and warm. "Fuck you for thinking you can do that, Foggy. Fuck you for thinking you aren't worth it." She grabbed the flashlight again, picked up the alcohol bottle. Steeled herself, and found that there _was_ steel within herself— something that _he_ had built, a strength that _he_ had worked so hard to bring to life. All she could do was try to give some of it back. "You didn't give up on Matt. You didn't give up on me. I'm not going to give up on you."

His jaw clenched and unclenched and he still didn't say anything, but his expression changed, moving away from something dark and submissive to something hardened and stubborn.

Karen shifted closer to him. "Hold still. I'm going to clean it n—"

"No no no, wait wait wait," he hissed, suddenly, bringing up one hand. "I need— I n— I'm going to scream. A lot. I need to... to not do that." He leaned forward, pawing for the duffel bag. Karen pushed it closer and he dug out one of the ACE bandages. She chewed her tongue and tried not to think of where one of the other ones had gone. "I don't... I don't want... anything to hear." Aliens, she thought. Or Matt. Probably Matt. Foggy's hands were shaking as he moved to bite down on the rolled bandage.

He gave her a muffled noise and a weak nod and Karen leaned in, peeling the gauze back from the wound. It was speckled with dust and dirt and whatever else had been in that tunnel.

"Do you have antibiotics in your bag?" she asked, and he gave her a short nod. "I think you'll need them." Karen hesitated for one more moment, then started with the alcohol. She'd seen him do it with Matt enough that she could do a decent imitation.

Foggy did a decent imitation of Matt by screaming, but it was into the bandage, making it sound a bit more like Matt's muffled whiny growls of pain. Matt had a tolerance for it. He was always healing from some agonizing wound or broken bone, a finger or a rib. But Foggy had zero tolerance, and it was obvious.

He was shuddering, twisting minutely, his body wanting to get away from what she was doing, but his mind sharp and strong enough to hold his body still. Karen searched the wound with the flashlight, finding more debris. She ran out of alcohol before she ran out of dust and dirt.

"Crap," she said.

Foggy's eyes were rolling under his eyelids again, and he was breathing so fucking hard. Hyperventilating. Karen reached out and squeezed his upper arm. It took a long moment before he seemed to notice, and rolled his head in her direction.

"I'm out of alcohol," she told him.

It took him a long time to get his breaths back under some semblance of control, and even then, it wasn't much. He spat out the bandage. "Saline," he told her.

"You don't have any in here."

He groaned. "Water."

"We don't have any of that, either."

" _Fuck_."

Karen sighed, and echoed him, pushing her hand back down her face again.

He was wavering. "I'm gonna pass out, Karen," he said, voice tremulous. "I'm... mm..." He tipped sideways. She dropped the flashlight and reached out, snatching his head before it fell onto the tile again. It would have fallen on his bruised cheek that time. The thing was already swollen and blackening. Christ, she'd barely noticed it until now, but she knew Foggy did the same thing whenever Matt had a multitude of injuries. Triage or something, wasn't that what it was called?

Karen slowly settled him down to the floor, shoving the duffel under his head so he wouldn't be resting his face on the filthy tile. He always complained about how little Matt weighed; she wondered if he had any idea how light he was himself. A small noise came out of him as she shifted his body around, carefully, so he was supine instead of leaning awkwardly to one side. Holding the leg and moving it like it wasn't part of him made her whole body heave with nausea.

She swallowed hard, sighed, fiddled with the dog whistle at her chest, and then took up the gauze again. Her hands were trembling as she pressed it back down over the wound, stomach turning over as she touched the exposed bone. Foggy yelped aloud when she started wrapping it, so she went as quickly as she could, just wanting the slow trickle of blood to stop, to not have to see his fucking shattered bone sticking out into open air anymore. Her hands were covered in his blood. Just like her knife was covered in Matt's.

Shivering, she taped the gauze down, then sat back, chewing on her lip and nudging the whistle from side-to-side with her thumb. After a minute, she shucked her jacket off and draped it over him. It didn't help.

The thought lingered in the back of her mind, whispering, forcing its way through her memories of the tunnel: nothing could help him. He was right. He was going to die.

"Fuck you," she whispered, to nothing, and to everything. " _Fuck_ you."

\---

Foggy came to while she was gathering water from the toilet cistern into the now-empty bottle of alcohol. The iodine tablets she'd found in the train were still inside his duffel; she added one to the water and shook it, waiting for the capsule to disintegrate.

"This shit hurts," he said, out of nowhere, and she jumped so hard she nearly spilled the bottle all over the floor.

"Jesus," she hissed.

Foggy grunted. He'd been doing a lot of that. He mimicked Matt so much and so often. He probably didn't even realize how much he was doing it. She knew she was the same. "I'm still alive." He sounded pretty shocked. He shouldn't have.

"No chance in hell I'd leave you down here to die, Foggy."

"Yeah, I know that." He seemed to be keeping himself very, very still. The pain was still on his face. Heavy and inapproachable. "What'd... what'd you do?"

"Not a lot. I wrapped it."

"I guess I'm... I'm not in shock. I'd be dead by now."

Her stomach went cold and heavy. She dodged the open subject of his death and how close it was to the bathroom door, and asked about something else. "How badly does it hurt?"

His voice was weak. "On... what scale? Zero to ten?"

Well, she knew Matt's 'ten' was her and Foggy's 'infinity', so... "Just tell me how much it hurts."

"Like hell, Karen. It hurts like hell."

She sighed, putting the bottle down and scooting over to him. The light coming in through the station was enough to light her way as she brushed the hair back from his face, and he tilted his head— just like Matt would— into the contact. He was covered in a cold sweat.

"Hi," she said, dumbly.

He blinked up at her. "Hi."

She kept one hand on his forehead, and put the other on his shoulder, speaking as clearly as she could. "We need to get out of here."

Foggy rolled his eyes. "This again."

"Yeah, again." She patted him on the forehead. "We're getting out of here. Now. We need to stay in the light, and it's going to get too dark in this station."

"It's gonna get dark everywhere."

"Shut the fuck up," she said, and picked up the bottle of water again. "Those iodine tablets I found. I used them on the water in that toilet cistern. Do you think it's okay to drink?"

"No way to tell for sure... not without Matt here." It terrified her, how fucked they were without him there. "My chances aren't great anyway, so..." he held out his hand.

Karen tried her damnedest to ignore what he said, then placed the water in his hand. Steeling herself, she moved closer, and hitched his back up against her chest until he was at least partially sitting, also trying to ignore his gasps of pain. "You don't weigh much," she said, idly, as he sipped at the water.

"Yeah, you don't either." He downed about a fourth of the bottle, and she wondered how much of his winces were caused by the taste or by his leg. Cautiously, he tilted his head down, letting it lean against her temple, breathing hard as he capped the bottle and clutched it with both hands in his lap. "...Thanks."

"Don't thank me until we're out of here," she said, pushing her temple against his head. A backwards version of Matt's sad little forehead touches. She took the bottle of water back and set it on the floor. "I'm gonna turn you until you're leaning against the wall, okay?"

"Can't wait."

It was awkward, moving him around, with his body stiff and nonpliant from pain and the cold. He leaned there like he had when they'd first gotten to the bathroom, fighting to breathe slowly. Karen sat next to him and sipped at the water. It tasted like metal and burnt rubber. She forced it down, and tried not to think about what sort of poison could be in it.

When she capped the bottle she went to rolling it around in her hands, thinking, trying to build up to what they were about to do. Getting him out was going to be dangerous, and difficult, and monumentally stupid, as far as his leg went. One wrong step and he could fall, and his bones would pierce an artery, and that'd be it for him. Karen chewed on a thumbnail, staring at the floor, trying to work out how to carry him and how to walk and what direction to go in.

Foggy spoke up softly. "You lied to me."

"What?"

He turned his head in her direction, looked her in the eye, pinpointing her exact location even in the half-light of the bathroom. "You lied about seeing Matt."

It came rushing back like it had never been gone to start with. His voice, the expression on his face, his total fear. _Karen. Karen. Karen._ She spoke similar to that shattered voice in her head. "No, I didn't." She tried to hold Foggy's gaze and faltered. They both knew it. The silence pushed in between them, a hulking shadow, and she was sure he could hear her heart's hammering in the sudden awful quiet.

Foggy, as always, broke the silence, only this time with an uneven sigh and a low sound of pain. He shut his eyes and leaned his head back on the wall again. "...You're wearing your own jacket. The one you gave to him."

Shit, fuck. Shit. Karen put her face in her hands, pushed out a sigh. Of course he'd notice it, why wouldn't he notice it? All he fucking did was notice things. It was his _job._ She didn't say anything, because she couldn't come up with anything that wasn't _'I stabbed him and I think he's probably dead'_. Her stomach twisted. Don't tell him. Don't tell him.

God, she could _hear_ him thinking about it, before he even opened his mouth and talked again. "Where did you see him?" he asked, and his voice was small and worried, not angry and rumbling like she'd expected it to be.

She spoke slowly, hoping worthlessly that something would come and interrupt her and she wouldn't have to tell him what she'd done. "I... I was in a maintenance room. One of the ones we'd already been in. He... he found me there."

"Was he okay?"

Karen swallowed. "No."

She thought she could hear his breathing start to speed up. "How badly was he hurt?"

"...Badly," she said faintly, and paused, then spoke again before he could demand more information. Yes, he was definitely breathing harder now. "He broke four ribs."

"He tell you that?"

"Yes."

Foggy pushed out a loud breath. "What else?"

For a long moment, the option of lying floated in her mind. She could tell Foggy that Matt had been dying when she found him. It would make it less of a surprise when he never returned. Her arm and the knife repeated itself in her head again and again and she tried to study it, fervent, tried to figure out where exactly she'd hit him. Probably his chest. A lung. Which meant he was definitely dead by now. Alone and afraid in a filthy subway tunnel. She didn't know it was possible to hate herself so fucking much.

But if he was dead anyway, why would it matter how he'd gotten there?

So Karen swallowed. And lied. Again. It shouldn't have been so easy, but she'd lied to so many people for so long before he'd found her, that it was like slipping back into a well-worn article of clothing. Easy. "He told me he was bleeding internally." She still wanted to vomit.

" _Fuck_ ," Foggy hissed, knocking the back of his head on the wall a few times. "God." His breath hitched again, louder. A sob. It seemed so different from the one he made when he was in pain. It was a lot worse. He pushed one hand down his face as if to conceal it, and she remembered a crumpled expression hiding itself in the folds of a too-large jacket. "God fucking _damnit_ , Matty," he sobbed, voice wet, "...Goddamnit."

Karen picked at the label of the bottle in her lap, and didn't talk.

So Foggy talked instead. "Did you... did you see him when... you got to the station?" His voice was fractured half by sobs, half by his soft noises of pain, all of them drowned completely in fear.

Don't tell him. "He wasn't there."

"He wasn't anywhere around?"

"I... I didn't stop to look. I was trying to get you out." She chewed on her tongue. "It was all... all dead things, Foggy. He wasn't there."

Foggy took a weak, shaking breath. "We can't... can't leave him down there. Not if he's..." another splintered sob broke from his throat. It sounded painful as hell. "Christ, Karen, I don't know what to do."

None of them did. Karen took a breath anyway, feeling like she couldn't get enough air because _he_ couldn't get enough air, and said, "We need to get you out of here." She didn't know what time it was, but she knew how much time had passed, and it was closer to night than day. They couldn't get trapped in the subway, not in the state they were in now.

He wasn't answering her, just leaning his head against the walls, eyes shut. Tears still leaking out from them. Karen didn't think they were ever going to stop.

But she braced her hands under herself, got to her feet, and started collecting all their things in the duffel bag. Foggy didn't react until she started zipping it shut, and then he lifted his head from the wall and said softly, "You can't move me. Like this," and waved at his leg. His face contorted in a mix of what seemed to be agony and understanding of how useless all of this was.

Karen just sighed. "I have to move you."

At that, Foggy's face twisted, and he shook his head again. "No. We need to... to set the bone. Place a spl-splint. I can't move around with..." he waved at the bloodied gauze around his leg. "Remember... I said... the artery?"

"Yeah. I remember." She leaned in a little closer to him, troubled by the fact that he was starting to talk more like Matt and less like himself. "How do I set it?"

She had no idea how one man's face could hold so much dread and so much pain. He swallowed a few times before talking. "You gotta... pull at it. So the bones, uh... go... go back in."

Her stomach rolled and she fought it off. "Are you... is that even safe?"

"No. I should be having fucking surgery right now, Karen," he said, then hissed and groaned. She hadn't even touched him and he was already making noises like he was being tortured. In many ways, he was. "And if we... if you didn't... if it's still contaminated... it's going to get infected." He coughed but it sounded more like a whole-body gag. "Badly."

"Show me how to do it."

Foggy was taking in breaths slow and stuttery through his mouth, but blowing them out in hard huffs through his nose. "If you fuck it up, I'll die."

"Yeah, that's helpful."

"Sorry," he said, and she could tell he meant it. Damned asshole and his stupid defense mechanisms. He waved to his leg again. "Pull on it. Uh, with your hands on my... on my shin. Ankle. I think." A pause. He looked to be swallowing back bile, and shook his head slightly like even _he_ knew this was the worst idea in the world. "...I've only seen it in books."

"Well, that's better than nothing." Karen mumbled, then crept forward, putting her hands where he asked, feeling the crusty stickiness of blood rubbing off on her palms. "Here?"

"Yeah." He fished around next to him with one hand until he found the ACE from before. "Pull hard. And hope that it puts the bone back where it belongs instead of..." shaking his head, he trailed off, then he took a few more breaths. "It'll be... it'll be okay, Karen. Just... try to... stay calm. Okay?"

Karen couldn't detect lies the way Matt could, but she'd been around Foggy enough to know that he had the second-worse poker face known to mankind. Matt was number one, of course. But she nodded, and didn't call him out. No need for another half-argument, not if she could kill him in the next few minutes— few _seconds—_ if she didn't do it right. But she didn't exactly know how to do it _wrong_ , either.

She looked up at him, and he was panting again, but still shoving the bandage into his mouth to muffle his screaming. Karen hovered her fingers around his ankle, hesitating, her hands shaking. Her throat was dry. If she fucked up, and he died, that meant she had killed both of them. Him _and_ Matt. Within hours of each other. Karen sobbed once, broken and quiet.

Then one of Foggy's hands reached out, and he wrapped his fingers around hers, squeezed once. He was trying to comfort her. _Him_ comforting _her_ , now that was a fucked-up thing considering the entire pile of shit that was their current situation.

Another sob tried to come out, but she walled it off and took a deep breath. "Okay, I'm gonna... uh... I'll count to three, okay?"

Foggy huffed, nodded.

Karen licked her lips, tightened her grip. "One." She felt his muscles stiffening under her hands. He started breathing harder. "...Two."

She pushed out a breath— no, a sob— then pulled as hard as she could. He was screaming, _howling_ , before she'd even completed the action, and it was a noise she'd never wanted to hear again. It was worse than the last one. Almost worse than Matt's high, sharp whine, the one like a wounded, keening animal. But neither of those noises compared to the terrified way he'd stumbled over her name in the tunnel.  _Karen. Karen._

Foggy was clenching his fists at his sides, shuddering all over, as she moved forward and lifted the gauze she'd placed, trying to see if the bone had gone back in. She tried to ignore his noises like he'd always try to ignore Matt's, and she failed just like he always did. Karen reached out to steady his shoulder.

"Don't pass out," she said.

He passed out.

Karen again found herself stopping him from hitting his fucking head on the floor. This time, she left him in that awkward position— his legs in front of him and his back against the wall. She took up the flashlight to peer in under the gauze, and took in a heavy breath when she found she couldn't see the bones sticking out anymore. There was still blood, trailing sluggishly out and down his leg, soaking the gauze, but that was it.

She sank down into a sitting position, shoving her hands through her hair. There were tears in her eyes again, but she couldn't quite feel them as much as she could feel her stomach roiling and twisting itself up under her sternum. Karen fought back the nausea, the churning urge to throw up, because she didn't want to lose the little water she'd managed to get into her system.

The light outside was starting to fade. Either from rain clouds or the approaching night, she couldn't tell. It didn't matter. They had to get moving. Soon. _Now._

Pushing the tears out of her eyes, she went back to work. A split. He needed a splint before he could be moved. She went back into the duffel bag, digging around. There wasn't anything in there that she thought could be used for one. Jesus, she should have been reading those medical texts like Foggy had, not trying to teach herself fucking Braille.

It didn't take him too long to come back around. She knew if he was unconscious for any long amount of time, it was a bad sign. Foggy made a snorting sound and tried to push himself up from the floor, a low moan rolling out of his throat. Another alien noise that she'd never heard from him before then.

Then he grunted a loud " _Fuck_ ," and well, at least _that_ was familiar.

"I need your help," she said, trying to make her voice an order. She just sounded scared and far, far too young. "Foggy."

"Fuck off," he grunted, and she pursed her lips. Right, he was probably confused. He'd just passed out. She didn't know. She had no fucking clue what the fuck she was doing. Something told her that Foggy was never sure, either.

Karen waited, her hands still inside the duffel bag, and eventually he got his hands under himself and attempted to push himself back up again. She moved over to help, put him back into position against the wall. He was ghostly white, sweating all over, eyes wild and bruised.

"You passed out," she told him, making sure he wasn't going to fall back down again before removing her hands from his shoulders. He was still pretty wobbly. That probably wasn't going to change anytime soon. "It's getting dark, Foggy. We need to get out of here."

Predictably, he didn't give her an answer. His eyes were a little glazed. Pain or because he'd passed out or because he was crying again— it didn't matter.

"Foggy," she said, sharpening her voice. "Tell me what to do."

Karen gave him a long minute, then sighed and gathered up the duffel bag before bending down and looping one of his arms over her shoulders.

He flailed for a second, then pushed her weakly away. "Not— not— you can't move me yet," he spoke, his words tumbling out messily. "You... you need to splint it." The last word sounded like he'd wanted to tack 'idiot' onto the end of it, but he didn't. Could have been the pain, too. Or the half-consciousness. "Keep it in... in... in one spot."

"Shit. Right." He'd even told her that earlier. What the fuck could she say? That the only experience she really had with broken bones was breaking her finger when she was in high school and wrapping Matt's ribs up? "What do I do?"

"There... there's a splint in there," he said, pointing to the duffel bag. "Cardboard."

Karen sat back down, digging it out. It looked like a piece of the Ikea box she'd put all her guns in when they left the shelter. "This is a splint?" It _was_ a piece of the Ikea box. Well, this would be why she was not the medic. "How do you learn all this shit?"

"Books," was his answer, which was as obvious as the rest of them. "Kind of glad I... I read them, now." He shifted against the wall and winced. "You should have splinted it... when... when I was passed out."

She tried not to let the irritation flare. It happened anyway. "You know I'm not good at this," she said, and she could hear anger in her voice. Carefully unfolding the cardboard, she tested its flimsiness and looked at him again. "I don't know if it'll hold."

"It'll hold. Get the tape, too."

Karen dug around until she found it— the same tape he'd used to bind Matt's broken finger. "Okay. Tell me what to do, then."

"Just... lay it out flat on either side, make sure it extends above the knee. I'm not gonna... gonna want to bend my leg at all. It'll f... it'll... we'll go right back to where... where we started."

She moved to follow his instructions, taping the thing together, ignoring his sharp hisses and flinches of pain. In the end, it looked exactly how she thought it would look— like she'd taped half of a fucking Ikea box to his broken leg. He guided her to the gauze wrap and she tied it in tight knots around the whole mess to keep it together. It looked like total shit. Neither of them commented on it.

"How are we going to, uh..." she tried not to concentrate too hard on the bloody gauze wrapped around the break, "...walk?"

"A three-legged race," he grumbled.

Karen's eyes drew to the ceiling. "Anyone ever tell you that shit isn't funny?"

He rolled his head in her direction. "...Anyone ever tell you that you have no sense of humor?"

"You're such a fucking asshole," she said, frowning, but she gathered up the duffel again, hauling it over her shoulder, then bent down next to him, pulling his arm up along the back of her neck, holding his wrist at her collarbone. She let out a breath, and it turned into a grunt halfway out as she lifted him slowly, still trying to ignore the noises he was making. Pain and reluctance. Too fucking bad. He'd pushed her to that gap in herself and made her jump it, and now she was going to do the same for him. His damage was just a lot more physical than hers. "Just lean on me."

He swayed, clutched wildly at her jacket. "Don't fuck— fucking drop me, okay?"

"I'm not going to drop you, Jesus," she said, gripping his wrist tighter at her shoulder, carefully adjusting the duffel bag hanging at her lower back before looping her other hand around his waist. "We don't have a gun, remember that."

"What do we have?"

She tried not to think about it, but, "My knife."

"Oh, good. You can... you can cut my throat if we get cornered."

Karen didn't know if he was being serious or not, so she didn't say anything.

He waited a long, awkward moment, as if anticipating her snapping at him for the joke, but when she did nothing, he only sighed, and talked again, tossing the entire thing to the wayside. "Where'd the guns go?"

Did he not remember that attack in the tunnels, when they'd been surrounded by that fucking pack— the one that was now in pieces in that station? "Uh. I dropped mine in the tunnel when those ferals showed up."

"Yeah, me too." Good, he _did_ remember it. Karen knew it was a good sign. She remembered him always asking memory-oriented questions whenever Matt came limping home with any sort of head wound. And just like Matt, he shivered harshly against her side, and she felt anger at herself for being unable to care about Foggy's trembling when Matt's had sent her spiraling into hyperventilation.

But he wasn't infected. That couldn't be the case, not on top of all this other bullshit. It was impossible.

He was breathing hard through his nose. The tears were back, but she suspected they hadn't really left to begin with. "Christ, it hurts, Karen."

"I gathered that," she hissed, steadying him. "All right. One step at a time, okay? Don't wobble." She swallowed, tried to find something encouraging to say. All of this was new to her. "We'll get out of here. Come on."

He moved forward sluggishly, stepping down with his uninjured leg, the other one shaking as he kept it lifted up. The blood was blooming back through the gauze already.

"Okay, good," she said. "Just... like, hop, I guess."

"Hop," he grunted.

"Yeah, a fucking three-legged race." She held him as tightly as she could, trying to angle it so that if either of them fell, she would go down first and somehow shelter his leg. It was stupid, but she needed something to think about. "Come on."

It was slow going. At least two or three minutes before they were even out of the bathroom and into the station, making their way to the exit stairs. Karen took one short glance behind them, to the rails, but there wasn't anything moving. Just blood and pieces.

For a half-moment, one flickering thought in her mind told her to take the whistle and blow it. Call Matt for help, coax him out of the tunnels and back to them, so that _he_ wouldn't die.

Then she remembered his snarl, the blood dripping from him, and her body moved of its own accord— faster, toward the stairs.

"Not— not so fast," Foggy breathed, struggling to keep up. "God."

"Shit, sorry."

She slowed, got them to the bottom of the stairs and hovered there. It was so silent behind them. Foggy was panting, swallowing pained groans. He looked over his shoulder for a long moment, his eyes searching just as hers had, but faster and with more intent. The station's image hadn't changed. Past the stairs, she could hear wind, and water. The rain hadn't stopped yet, but there was light. They had that much going for them.

Karen gave Foggy an attempt at an encouraging tug. "Up. Come on."

He pulled back, shook his head, kept his gaze to the half-lit station. "I can't leave him down here, Karen. I can't." His voice trembled and he sucked in a sob. "What if— what if he's—"

"He's not safe," she told him, more of a bark than anything else. "You said he's not safe." She pulled a little harder, tried to shake him out of it. God, the last thing she needed was to hear that snarl again. Her skin crawled just thinking about it. "We need to _go_. Now."

Foggy wouldn't tear his wet eyes from the station. His expression was slowly crumbling away, leaving behind something so fucking raw and terrible that Karen had to avert her own line of sight to the floor so she didn't have to see it. Coughing out another sob, wet and fractured, he turned his face back to the stairs, and gave her a nod she only barely saw.

"I'm so _sorry_ , Matty," he breathed, so quietly that Karen would never in her life be sure if it hadn't been the wind speaking instead.

They started moving up to street level, one step at a time. Foggy had to pause on every single one, panting for breath between the sobs that were pouring, unstoppable, from his chest. He had more than one reason to be crying this time. She wondered which one hurt the most, but she already knew what the answer would be.

Moving from the silence of the station to the white noise of the street was disorienting, but the further upward they moved, the more light they found themselves in. There were no black clouds swirling overhead anymore like circling beasts, just the same monotone green-grey streak of the sky that had been present ever since the rain had first started.

How long had that even been? Weeks. Maybe a few months. How long had Foggy and Matt been living with her? Their routine had been so normal, so welcoming, that she couldn't even tell when the rhythm of her previous existence had faded and been replaced by it. Her stomach twisted in pain when she realized she'd never be able to get up early again and make coffee for the three of them, and it was such a strange thing, she thought, to be so saddened at its loss.

Karen blinked hard, pushing the heat from her eyes, and sniffed. Foggy stopped on another stair and, for just a moment, pushed his face against her neck as if to wipe his own tears off there. She shifted her hand around and patted his shoulder, and he sobbed again at the contact.

"I've got you," she said, into his ear. "I've got you. Come on."

Another handful of steps, and they were outside. The smells hit her first, that dead scent of the river— the water, the rain— and the stench of the aliens. So thick and heady that if she shut her eyes, she could have sworn she was only inches away from one of them. Foggy made a heaving noise next to her, then gagged, but thank God, he didn't vomit.

"Christ," he choked out. "The smell."

She adjusted her grip on his wrist. "What the hell were they doing out here?"

He shook his head, coughed and swallowed, gagged again. That, too, was probably for multiple reasons. All she could smell was death and burnt rubber and _them_ , the scent that defied description. It clung to everything and sheltered heavily in her nose and took ages to go away.

The city still looked the same, all cracked and crumbling to pieces. For a second, after being inside a moderately intact subway station for so long, she'd thought she would step outside and it would be intact, that time would have rewound itself and revealed that all of this was a horrible dream.

Not a chance. She cursed her mind for even fantasizing about it.

They were just stepping out into the street when she heard a distant gibbering howl. A feral. Somewhere in the tunnels, echoing. Another voice joined it, then another. Calling back and forth. Wolves of a different age. Foggy shuddered against her, shook his head some more, sucked in breaths that turned back into sobs before they could reach his lungs.

"What is that?" he asked, frantic but weak. "Why— why do they— why are they making that noise?"

He must not have heard it before, their howling, but she knew _she'd_ heard it, not long ago, that deep and terrible booming noise that seemed to come from the center of the earth, not the lungs of what used to be a human being. She knew, because she'd heard _Matt's_ , that inhuman howl he'd blasted when he'd killed those members of the pack. She knew it was his because no other feral she'd ever encountered could make noises as loud and furious as his were.

They echoed in her mind, rattled around, sloshed the tar back and forth through her thoughts. _Karen. Karen. Karen._

She took a breath. "It's... they do that when they... they win."

"Win," Foggy repeated. He gagged again, but she couldn't tell why. "Matt," he said, and really, that was all he had to say. Karen knew what he was thinking because she was wondering about the exact same thing.

Had they found Matt? Were they crowing triumph over the corpse of the alpha that had killed so many of them, and wounded even more? God, what would they do to him?

Karen grit her teeth and tried to force away the images that her mind was trying to answer her with. She wanted to go back. Matt deserved to be buried, to be remembered, not picked apart and scattered through the fucking New York subway system, which was exactly what those goddamn monsters would do to him.

Then, his snarl again, the dripping blood, the boiling and bubbling memories overtaking her mind. No, she couldn't go down there. Her own reflexes would prevent it. She'd spiral back down into panic and be right where she'd started.

Well, they didn't exactly need a body to build a grave, she thought.

She sniffed, blinked away tears, tried to ignore the thick stench all around them and the sounds behind them in the subway, then spoke a soft, "Come on. Keep going," and carefully guided Foggy down the street.

\---

They'd been moving at a decent rhythm. Step, step, pause, step, step, pause. It was slow, getting through the debris, the wreckage, the bodies, but they were moving, and that was the most important thing. Her guess had been correct— it was nearing nightfall. Foggy had stopped sobbing, but there were still tears, moving silent and ceaseless down his face. In the light, he looked so pale that his skin appeared nearly fucking translucent. His busted cheekbone was swelling badly, all around his eye. He didn't seem to notice it.

The rain drizzled down all around them, and Foggy had his sweater hood pulled up to wall it off, but it wasn't doing much. It was already starting to eat through the cotton, tiny holes like it had become moth-eaten.

When they stopped for air at an intersection, he lifted his head and coughed out, "Where the fuck... are we?"

"I have no idea."

It wasn't like they had a whole lot of landmarks to guide them. All the skyscrapers were long-destroyed, flattened to dust like nearly everything else.

Foggy shifted against her, hissed as his foot brushed the ground. "There. That's the Brooklyn." He pointed to their left, to the distant shadow of a bridge, a specter rising silent through the veils of grey rain. One of the bridge's towers was half-gone, the road itself twisted up and half in the river. They'd had to take the Williamsburg to get to the apartment from the shelter. "That... that means we're... still in Brooklyn." A low sigh mixed in with a sharp groan. "Still in Matt's territory."

What good was that, if Matt was fucking dead? Karen clamped down on the thought. "Yeah. That's good, right?"

"Not if he's dead," Foggy muttered.

Well, fuck her for trying to spare him, then.

She adjusted her grip on him, ignoring the ache in her back and shoulders. The gashes she'd gotten from those aliens were long-healed, but the scar tissue still hurt from time to time. "How far do you think we are from the apartment?"

"I'm not... walking all the way back to... the apartment," Foggy told her. "It's a fucking miracle I've gotten this far." He shifted on his good leg, groaning aloud. "I'm gonna... fucking kill Matt... if he's not dead yet," he hissed.

Karen started moving again, feeling him clutch her shoulder. His grip had been getting weaker and weaker the more they moved. "Why?"

He spoke between steps. "For taking us... down in the tunnels... in the first fucking place."

She frowned. His voice didn't sound like it usually did whenever he was admonishing Matt. No matter what he was saying, there was always that undercurrent, soft and gentle, that tone in his words that belied that strange and seemingly-endless love he had for the other man. It was gone now. Now he just sounded empty and angry. She supposed she would be the same way if she was the one who'd snapped her leg in that tunnel.

They both fell to silence, and kept moving. Guiding Foggy through the piles and piles of debris and bodies was time-consuming, and it was only going to get darker. She started casting her gaze around, looking for somewhere they could stay. Just overnight. In the morning, they'd pack it back up and... well.

One step at a time. She'd figure it out tomorrow.

Karen kept chewing on her tongue, looking around, knowing that her movements were getting more and more frantic and rushed. Shit, they were going to get caught. This was a stupid idea. They were going to be trapped out in the darkness, and this time, they didn't have their guide, a man that fucking resided in darkness permanently.

Another half-block passed, and she caught sight of something sticking halfway out of an alley— a school bus. The yellow paint had been eaten away by the rain a long time ago, leaving behind a rusted mess, but it was intact. And it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.

"There. Over there," she said, angling Foggy toward it.

He lifted his head shakily, made a low noise that might have been trying to be a laugh. At what, she never really knew. The fact that they were hobbling toward a fucking school bus for safety, or half-delirious from pain. She got them to it and stuck her fingers in between the doors. The rubber separator crumbled right under her hand, made fragile and useless by the rain.

Karen shook the mess off, then shoved the doors open. The smell inside was more musty than anything else— at any other point in her life, the scent might have been disgusting, but she'd been smelling aliens and rain for so long that it was like a breath of clear, fresh air.

"Okay, I'm gonna... put you on one of these seats," she breathed, moving him carefully. A few seats in the back had been torn out, for one reason or another. Judging by the vague cleanliness of the bus' interior, she could only assume someone had camped here once. Not ferals. They would have left filth everywhere.

Foggy made a high, sharp noise as she set him down, settling his leg down to the floor in tiny, half-inch movements. His head fell back, resting on top of the seat. "Christ," he said, and she could only agree with him.

"Yeah." Karen pulled the duffel off of her shoulder and set it down in the opposite seat, rolling her shoulders, sighing in relief. God, everything hurt. And she wasn't even the one with a broken leg. Still, there was shit to be done. "We're still out of alcohol," she said, leaning against the seat, because she knew if she sat down, she wouldn't be getting back up anytime soon. "We need to get the rain off."

"There's alcohol wipes in with the gauze," he said softly. "The tin."

Karen frowned. The shift of muscles over her face were already starting to sting and burn. "Why didn't you let me use them on your leg?"

He shrugged, shutting his eyes. "Knew you'd need them for the rain." Casual, like he was only giving her the last spoonful of honey for fucking tea, not something that could mean the difference between living and dying.

"Jesus, you're such a fucking idiot," she hissed, finding the tin in the duffel bag. There they were, right at the bottom. She dug them out and held them in her hand. "There's only three here."

"Hence why I was saving them."

Right, okay, so he did have a point. The asshole marveled at Matt's insane memory all the time, but never gave himself credit for his own. Karen sat down across from him and tore one open, leaning in. "I gotta clean you off."

"Clean yourself first," he said, turning his face away from her.

She sighed, and did as she'd been asked to. The burn of the alcohol felt so distant compared to everything else. When she pushed the wipe through her hair, a small handful of strands came right out with the alcohol.

"Fucking rain," she breathed.

"I think it's the worst part of all this," he said, talking in a low murmur.

She wanted to say, _Nothing could be worse than losing your best friend to that fucking virus_ , but kept it to herself. No need to bring Matt up again. Foggy had more important things to concentrate on. Like not dying.

"I miss fresh vegetables the most," Karen mumbled, finishing with her face and moving in to clean his off. "The Internet. My..." she stopped herself before she said _Job_ , because that was the word she'd queued up, "...bathroom," she blurted, awkwardly.

"Your bathroom?" he asked, through a clenched jaw and a doused hiss of pain.

"Yeah. Running water. Warm, running water. A flushable toilet." She moved as quickly as she could, cleaning around his busted cheekbone. God, it didn't look good. Not a single part of him looked right. "You know... flushable without needing a bucket."

Foggy huffed, keeping his eyes shut as she finished his face and went for his hair. A few more strands became tangled up in her fingers, but she just brushed them off and kept going. His skin was still pale, sweaty, underneath the mess.

When she was done, she folded the used wipe carefully and set it aside, then dug out the bottle of water she'd managed to find and purify. Holding it in her hand, knowing it was all they had— she had to pause, and swallow a few times, blinking the tears from her eyes. She took a drink and so did Foggy.

He laid his head back down, then spoke after a minute. "I'm so fucking hungry."

"Yeah. The food was in my backpack." She capped the bottle and set it on the floor. "I'll uh... go out in the morning. Dig around."

"You won't find anything."

"Doesn't mean I can't try."

A wasted reflex of a smile tried to jump across his face. He lifted one hand weakly, gestured toward her. "I need... I need something. For the pain. Can you..."

"Oh. Yeah." She dug out his big Ziploc of medication. "Which one...?"

"There should be... uh... I think it's called... tramadol. Something like that. It's marked. Little white pills." He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

Karen tilted the bag around in the fading light, then found the bottle and pulled them out. "Why didn't you take them before we started moving?"

"...I think it's a narcotic. I didn't want to... be high or something... when we were trying to hurry." He sighed, that low and fractured one, like a dying creature, but took the pills in his hand when she got them out of the bottle, downed them with another sip of the water. "Thanks."

"...Yeah." She put the water on the floor again, then got up and nudged him gently over so she could sit next to him. The rain rattled on the roof above them, all around them, endless static. She sniffed, settled a hand on his leg. God, she missed her home— the apartment— and she didn't even know how long she'd been referring to it as such. Their easy little routine. Karen swallowed, sniffed again, wiped at her eyes.

Foggy's hand came and rested against her arm. He didn't say anything. She didn't think she wanted to hear anything.

Karen leaned over, placed her head on his shoulder. His temple came down against hers, rubbed slightly, went still.

The rain roared on the roof.

"...Are we gonna be okay?" she whispered.

His thumb rubbed a weak circle against her arm. "No."

She swallowed, and wiggled closer to him, and didn't talk anymore. He fell asleep like that, and she let him, as the night closed in around them, a formless cage to catch a wild beast. The rain never stopped. She stayed awake, listening to the distant shrieks, the garbled howling, and the sounds of death echoing through the skeleton of the city.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _And don't lie, don't lie, don't lie._  
>  _I know we're fixing to die._  
>  Keaton Henson


	25. fragile (part one)

In the morning, the rain dwindled to a weak drizzle, becoming a soft hiss against the roof of the bus instead of a thousand rattling drumbeats. Karen gazed out the window, not even seeing what was out there, working on breathing and trying not to think too hard. Foggy was still leaning against her, puffing breaths against her collarbone. He was exhausted. They both were.

Aliens had come by in the night, three or four times, never close enough for her to panic. Moving from one spot to another without pausing or lingering. There were ferals, too, just before dawn, north of them. Gibbering and hollering, like in the tunnels. They were moving, too, but right as the sun was beginning to glow filthy orange through the sickly rain clouds, there was a series of beeps. Noises like squealing pigs at slaughter, then nothing.

She didn't hear the ferals again after that, and smiled weakly toward the windows in the resulting silence.

Foggy awoke about an hour later, shifting against her shoulder, dragging in a sharp breath. It came back out as a loud, shuddering groan. Her stomach churned even though there was nothing in it, and there was acid at the back of her tongue already, mingling with the sickening taste of dehydration that coated her entire mouth.

"Hey," she breathed, bringing her arms up to steady him. They felt so heavy. "Don't move, your leg's still busted."

"Couldn't have guessed," Foggy grunted, rubbing at his rain-burned face with both hands. "Pills. Now."

Karen nodded and slipped carefully away from him. He uttered a weak, "Please," like an afterthought, when she dug the bottle out from the duffel bag.

"Just a second," she said, shaking out two of the pills into her hand and fumbling for the bottle of water on the floor. There wasn't much left. A cup or so, maybe. She still stuck them in Foggy's hands, watching as he shoved the pills in his mouth and gulped down the rest of the water. Well, there hadn't been more than a few mouthfuls left, anyway.

He realized what he'd done after leaning his head back on the seat and holding the empty bottle for a few seconds. "Shit... was that all of it?"

"Yeah."

"Fuck. Sorry."

Karen just hummed and took the bottle from his hands. "You need to take antibiotics."

His tongue was moving around in his mouth, as if chasing every last hint of the painkiller along his gums. "...All we have's... ugh. Cipro... whatever, and uh... cepha... something." He made a noise in the back of his throat that turned into a cough halfway out. "They're expired."

"That doesn't mean they won't work, right?"

Foggy sighed. "I don't know. I'm not a doctor."

Karen went and gathered them anyway, digging out the two bottles and pouring out a few capsules of each. He accepted them, and swallowed them dry. His face twisted in disgust and pain, but he got them down, and they didn't come back up. She watched for a long minute, replacing the medication to its place in the Ziploc and picking the water bottle back up.

Another minute, and she started to talk. "I need to go out," she said. "I need to try to find some water." She picked at the bottle's label, dragged her thumbnail along the broken plastic seal underneath the bottlecap. "I don't have any other containers."

"Look through my duffel. You can f..." he trailed off, started over, "...the gauze tin."

She turned and started taking things out of the bag, lining them up carefully on the bus seat. The pills she took out of the Ziploc, after peering closely at the plastic to look for holes. She just needed anything that could hold liquid inside. When she got to the turkey baster, she paused, and turned half-toward him with it.

"So... why do you have this?" she asked, hoping to distract him from the pain, at least for a few moments.

Foggy had to stare at it for a long moment before he figured out what it was she was holding. "It's, uh. For getting blood out of wounds. Or mouths." He blinked a few times, expression tightening up momentarily. Pain. "Matt f... found it on one of his runs. Didn't... didn't know what it was. I thought if he... ever had another, uh, tooth... it would help. The drool."

Karen fiddled with it for a minute, remembering that dark, rainy day. Matt sobbing in terror through the hallucinations caused by the sedative. She wouldn't have thought it was possible for him to be any more frightened than he had been that day, but the way he'd looked at her in the tunnel told her just how wrong she was.

She sighed, shaking her head, and put the baster back into the duffel bag. "I'm gonna take it with me. In case I need it to get to some water."

"'Kay." He tried to turn toward her, but once he jostled his leg, he went completely still with a choked noise caught up in his mouth. "Fuck," he hissed, squeezing tears out of his eyes. For a minute, he worked on breathing slowly, in through his mouth and out through his nose. Then he swallowed, and mumbled, hesitant, "I... I need help, Karen."

"Yeah, okay," she said, shoving the supplies aside as she moved back to the gap between the seats. Karen was pretty sure she could guess what he needed. "Bathroom?"

"Uh-huh."

There was no awkwardness to be found in the interaction; not when there weren't any emotions involved. Karen handled it like she might handle giving him a tissue for a runny nose, except now it was the tea tin that she handed over. "Here. I'll dump it outside when you're done." Which was exactly what she ended up doing. While they could side-step and dance clumsily around their feelings, biology was an entirely different matter.

"Thanks," he breathed when he was finished, looking just a degree less uncomfortable. It was something. "I'm dehydrated."

She took the tin from his hands. "We both are."

"When are you gonna go out?"

Karen closed the tea tin, intending to wash it clean if she found water. "Right now."

"All right." He took a few more breaths, let them out slowly. "I should, uh. Lie down. Elevate my leg."

"Okay." She slid over to his side of the bus. "There's no seats in the back. I think someone holed up in here before we did." As gently as she could, she lifted his arm and hooked it over her shoulders. "Ready?"

"Uh. Yeah. Just..." his voice fell away again, and he reached over with his other hand and patted her leg. "...Thank you."

"Don't thank me," she said, and lifted him up.

He screamed once, short and sharp, but then clamped down on the sound and clenched his jaw shut. There were still noises bubbling out of his chest, strangled crying and walled-off groans. Karen moved carefully, pulling him up and out from the seat, then shuffling sideways down the aisle to the back of the bus. His whole body was shaking from the strain by the time they got there, and she spent a long few minutes slowly lowering him down while he gasped and tried not to shout in her ear.

Karen got him leaned up against the emergency exit door, both legs in front of him. He sat there, hunched, unmoving, for a while. His fingers were again twisted up in the fabric of his pants, his skin pale as anything.

"Are you gonna pass out again?" she asked, crouching down next to him on her haunches.

"Trying not to," he bit out, breathing hard. His eyelids fluttered rapidly. "Jesus _Christ_ , Karen. It hurts so f... fucking _bad_."

His words swam through her head, then dove down to her stomach and thrashed around like living creatures, driving nauseating acid up her throat. "Yeah, I know."

She waited a while as he caught his breath and his pained groans dwindled down to quiet, weak little grunts. He was so fucking different than Matt, who, when injured, would just growl out that soft rumble or low whine, and suck it up. Matt complained so rarely about pain that when he actually did, she knew it was something serious. She thought that if he'd been the one with bones sticking out of his leg, he would have probably mumbled _'Hurts not a lot'_ in his disjointed way of speaking and kept right on going.

As it was, she still preferred taking care of Foggy.

When he eventually quieted down, he lifted his head and looked at her. God, she'd never seen him look so sick and pale, not even when Jack had found him near death in the Park. She knew now how Foggy felt whenever Matt came limping home, bleeding and hurting. What it felt like to have to stare at pain and try not to take any in herself. No wonder Foggy worried so much, fretted so often.

"Karen," he mumbled, and she raised her eyes from his leg to his face. "I..." He fell quiet, hesitant. Foggy was always so good with words. Seeing him unable to speak was a strange thing. "...Be careful. Okay?"

"Yeah, of course," she said, and reached out to grip his shoulder. She'd meant to only do it for a second, but the second turned into a long, winding, awkward moment until he lifted his hand and patted the top of hers. She could see words flitting around his mouth that he wouldn't let out. For another graceless second, she considered tilting her head down, pressing their foreheads together, but abandoned the thought in the next moment, finally pulling away with a rough clearing of her throat. "Um."

"Don't, uh. Don't get yourself hurt, okay?" he asked, staring at the floor.

"No. I'll be back. Uh, soon." God, when had they gotten so bad at this?

Foggy coughed, then winced. "Can you... uh, help? With the... elevation part." He was pulling his sweater off over his head. Thankfully, the winter was cold, and he still had another longsleeve on beneath it. "Here, put this under it." He held out the sweater.

Karen nodded, taking it, then bent back down, helping him to the floor. She only hesitated for a second or two before lifting his leg gingerly and resting it on his bundled-up hoodie. He made those sounds again that told her he was swallowing the pain and only allowing the softest, most agonized noises to come from his chest.

She got to her feet, rubbing her face. "You look comfortable."

"I love it."

Karen hovered. And she'd thought  _Matt_ was awkward. At least he had an excuse.

"You know... for a minute there, I thought... the virus was gonna kill me. Good thing I broke my leg," he said, trying to smile. It didn't work. It shattered to pieces before it could even start to appear. "You should probably get moving... before the rain picks back up again."

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll... I'll be right back."

"Be home for supper," Foggy said, folding his hands on his stomach and attempting to get comfortable. Kind of difficult with a metal floor. And a broken leg.

Karen attempted a smile, but just like him, hers didn't work, either.

\---

Rain fell in murky, inconsistent curtains all around her as she made her way down the street, the way they'd come. Fog clung to the air, curled around the bases of buildings, made everything around her seem like a place only a ghost should reside in. Crumbling walls rose on each side of the street, and she stuck close to them, keeping herself out of the open.

It was so quiet. Of course, the world was almost always quiet— no distant traffic, no murmuring chorus of life from the millions of people that used to live there. Without Foggy or Matt, there was nobody to talk to, nobody at her side to wall off the silence. Every little sound and brush of wind became a lot more overwhelming when she didn't have anyone to share it with.

The duffel bag weighed next to nothing on her shoulder. Inside, the gauze tin kept knocking into the water bottle, creating a soft sound that echoed weakly down the street. No growling, no rapid footsteps, no clicking or beeping; she was alone. And it had been a long time since she'd felt such loneliness. It was just as painful as she remembered.

Karen moved toward the first building she could find that still had four walls standing. The roof was partially collapsed, and she ended up carefully picking her way up and over a pile of brick and dust to get in. She dug out the flashlight and turned it on, pressing deeper inside.

Scavenging had never really been her strongest skill. Not the kind of scavenging that found her digging through dust and wrecked buildings, sifting through shattered kitchens and bathrooms and _homes_ for the tiniest scraps of anything. She should have taken more water from that cistern in the subway bathroom. Hell if she was going to go back down there alone.

Regardless, she knew a few tricks. She brushed her foot across the thick layer of dust on the floor. Carpet. She moved further inside, pushed more dust away. Linoleum. So, a bathroom or a kitchen. Some sort of utility room. Nudging aside a pile of bones that might have once been a small dog or a large cat, she crouched and started opening a set of cupboards near the floor.

More dust clouded up around her as she shined her flashlight inside. More dust. Mold, mottled dark green and yellow, growing so thick along discolored wood that it was more like animal fur. That was about the only thing that grew out in the dust, she knew that. It smelled like rotten eggs and she had no idea if it was originally from her planet or not. Past it, there were a few unevenly stacked pots and pans. She was in a kitchen.

Straightening, she fumbled around for more cupboards. Half of the separating wall was collapsed, and she figured that the pile of splinters and wire heaped up near it contained a toppled refrigerator. Karen climbed over it and kept digging. The dust clung to every part of her, stuck in gritty patches along the sweat on her skin. It smelled like ash, plastic, and Matt. Mostly Matt.

There was a small group of tin cans near the back of one cupboard. Their labels were faded beyond recognition, but she grabbed them anyway and threw them into the duffel bag. Underneath a slanted counter, she found a bottle of dishwasher soap; she took that, too. Anything was a blessing when you had nothing.

Karen picked her way down what used to be a hallway, frowning at a set of picture frames that sat crooked on the wall. She ran a thumb along the dust on one of them; uncovered the smiling face of a young girl. For a minute, she studied it, resisting the urge to sweep away the rest of the dust. It was something she didn't like thinking about, because it only gave her a worthless clump of sadness that sank heavily in her gut. So many lives just gone.

There were a set of bedrooms down the hallway. One of them had a relatively intact bed, and a bureau off to one side. She tugged it open and found a few folded blankets, a faded set of bedsheets. Karen stuffed them into the duffel bag and tried not to think about the splintered baby's crib in the corner of the room.

She hunted down two bathrooms and sifted through them. The cistern of the first toilet was mostly dried up, with an oily film floating on top of the remaining water. It smelled like the Hudson, so she replaced the ceramic lid and moved on, ignoring how dry her mouth was. God, she was thirsty. Hungry. Fucking tired. She wanted to go home.

Karen hovered, bewildered, in the middle of the second bathroom when the thought struck her: the shitty little apartment on top of that old auto body shop, _their_ shitty little apartment— _t_ _hat_ was her home. She'd never had such a clear definition of the word when she thought about that shitty futon, the faded coffee table, the cramped storage room and the drafty garage. All she wanted was to go back there.

Never before in her life had she felt like she belonged somewhere, anywhere. But that was what the feeling was, she _knew_ it. Her shattered little family and their tiny apartment. God, she'd ruined everything.

What a fucking surprise—Karen Page had come across a good thing and completely fucked it up with her stupidity and inexperienced bullshit.

Wiping her face, she sniffed a few times, then continued her search. She didn't have time for this. Foggy didn't have time for this.

The second cistern was half-full, and the water smelled fairly stagnant, but not dead. She swirled a finger through it, brought it to her lips. It tasted like must and metal, not too bitter, but clearly not yet safe to drink. Karen went about collecting it, filling the alcohol bottle, transferring water from it to the tin to clean it out, then filling that, too. She dug around for the iodine tablets and put them in the water to purify it, then put everything back in the duffel except for the tea tin; she had to carry it in her hands.

Well, it was something. She hadn't intended to go back to the bus with empty hands, anyway. Karen picked through the rest of the house, or at least the places she could get to. She found a small stack of kitchen towels and two rolls of toilet paper, but nothing else of worth. God, she sucked at scavenging. Matt was the professional. He could find fucking _anything_ , just like Foggy said he could.

Karen wished she had Matt with her now.

Stepping back out into the street, she sighed, and shivered. The rain was still hissing down, more a mist than anything else. She gathered her jacket close around her, set the tea tin down on an overturned sedan for later collection, and kept searching. The whistle hung down around her neck and she fiddled with it constantly, but never blew into it, no matter how much she wanted to.

Matt wasn't safe. Matt wasn't safe. She said it to herself in her head, over and over, and wondered how many repetitions it would take for such a lie to be considered truth.

Karen kept looking. More buildings, more bones and rot and dust, dust, dust. She found some more tin cans, some clothing. Small things that probably wouldn't be of much help. A bottle of vodka that had been tucked behind a disintegrating couch. Eighty-proof. Foggy would know if it was of any use. She resisted the urge to sneak in a drink of it. That wouldn't help with anything.

It was at least two hours before she finally started moving back to the bus, her collection of cans and fabric—fuck it, _trash_ , it was just trash, and they were going to have to live off of it—hanging heavy on her shoulder. The fog had started to lift, and she could see the front end of the bus sticking out awkwardly into the street as she approached it. Everything was silent now; it made the air heavy, curled tightly around her like restraining arms.

There was a soft clatter down the alley as she moved up to the bus' door; she jolted and turned her head, drawing the knife at the same time. She adjusted her grip on the handle as she slipped further down the alleyway, peering around. It was empty.

She thought she might have heard ragged breathing, somewhere above her, but then the wind blew a sharp gust of icy air over everything, and she knew it'd been only that.

\---

"Any... anything good?"

Foggy's faint voice reached her as she climbed the small set of steps up into the bus. He sounded so weak, so ill. Karen swallowed before turning toward him, afraid of how awful he'd look.

It was pretty bad. He hadn't moved much, and looked somehow paler than before. Sweaty and shivering. His eyes were glazed, and there were two well-worn trails of dampness running down from their corners and across his temples. The bandages around his leg were totally soaked with blood, no longer a couple blooming patches of red that stuck out so strangely in the grey-green swirl her world had become.

Karen went to him and sat down, placing the tea tin carefully to the side. "Yeah. Some water. Some blankets. Some food, I hope." She didn't start digging things out of the duffel bag quite yet. "Let me look at your leg."

Foggy flinched even though she hadn't touched him at all. "Uh... it, uh... it's pretty bad," he mumbled, rolling his head from side-to-side on the metal floor. "I... I can't really... move it."

"I know," she said, and leaned in close. Even with the gauze covering it, she could see how swollen and red it had become. God. That wasn't good.

"Can I have s... some water?"

Karen nodded, turning away to pull out the alcohol bottle. The iodine capsule had disintegrated, at least. She took the top off and hitched him up against her chest, guiding the bottle into his hands—and also another dose of the painkiller, at his request. Yeah, she'd be inhaling them like fucking Skittles if she had an injury like his. But he took them, washed them down with water, twisted his lips at the taste of it all.

When he was done, she took the bottle and laid him back down, moving back to the wound, lifting the gauze a little to try to get a look. Foggy made a choked yelping sound, a bit more like Matt than she wanted to admit, and she recoiled. "Sorry."

"It's—Karen, it's—it's okay."

"No, it's not."

"Okay, it's—it's not." He took a minute and forced himself to breathe slowly. "The pain's radiating."

"It's swelling a lot."

He let out a dry, empty laugh. "No shit."

Karen pushed her fingers through her hair. "I found some vodka out there. Do you think that'll help to clean it out?"

Foggy was swallowing repeatedly, staring at the bus' ceiling. He blinked hard; a few tears slipped out and recrossed the damp paths that were already present on his skin. He'd been crying a long fucking time. "The b—the bone's already s-set. Inside. You'd have to..." he made a clumsy motion with both hands, like he was breaking a pencil, "...get back in there. To clean it. Again."

"Yeah, that isn't happening." Her mind raced. Had she gotten all that shit off? It'd been a sequence of panic, her cleaning it out, that awful yank she'd had to give to his ankle to get the bones back in place. Karen went back for the gauze again. "At least let me clean the outside, okay?"

He was already shuddering, shaking his head, crying harder. There was terror on his face and, God, Karen never wanted to see a look like that on him. Gentle, easygoing Foggy, scared to shivering silence as he imagined the pain he'd have to go through. His voice cracked and shook, terrified, but his choice of words suggested nothing of the sort. "Y-yeah. Clean it again. We need to... to close the wound."

Karen just nodded, gathering up his supplies. She grabbed the scissors first, to cut away the used gauze. Her hands were shaking, in fear and exhaustion and hunger. "We'll just start with this, all right?" She hunted down the ACE he'd bitten into earlier, tossed it to him. "It's pretty quiet out there, but... you never know."

"Uh-huh." His voice became tight and strained. He was still crying. "Okay," he huffed, breathless, then laid his head back and clamped down.

She cut away the gauze as quickly as she could, but it stuck to the wound when she went to pull it off. Foggy's scream rattled around in the bus like razorblades in a tea tin, barely muffled by the bandage in his mouth. Karen tore the rest of the gauze off as quickly as she could, tossing it to the floor, feeling the hiss break out between her lips at the sight of what she uncovered. Swollen, bright red. There was something leaking out that wasn't blood, some clear dribble of fluid.

"This uh... this looks..." she took a breath, "...really bad."

Foggy was still trying to wrestle the screams out of his throat, and she waited as he slowly caught his breath, let his sobbing dwindle to weakened little gasps. She reached out, unsure, and went to hold his hand, wrapping hesitant fingers around his; he squeezed back tightly, painfully, but she didn't try to pull away. It took a long time before he rolled his head back into her direction, his eyes glazed and hazy and oddly distant. She stared at him and he stared back. Normally, she was not this awkward.

Normally, one of her friends—God, the only friend she still fucking _had_ —wasn't heaving in pain from a broken leg on the floor in front of her.

His jaw worked for a second. "Hi," he said, after a while.

"Hi."

His other hand was patting around the floor on his other side. "I need to... can you lift me? So... so I can look at it?"

Good, something she could actually manage. Karen nodded and placed his hand down, then angled herself around and lifted him by the shoulders, careful with the injured one, leaning his back against her chest. Even without shifting his leg, he was making a low keening noise of agony, mumbling, " _Fuck fuck fuck fuck_ fuck _,_ " under his breath.

She waited while he got his face in the direction of the wound, then helped him lean in closer to look. His whole body was trembling within a few seconds; his breaths started coming a little faster.

"What is it?" she asked, fearing the answer despite knowing what it would be.

"...It's getting infected," was his low mumble. "Oh, God."

She never wanted to hear that coming from him, and found herself speaking quickly, like her words could erase his. "We can clean it. We have alcohol." They could fix it. _Foggy_ could fix it. He'd fixed Matt's infected knee and her own infected fucking emotions, he could fix a goddamn leg.

He wasn't speaking, just letting out small sounds. Stifled sobs.

"Hey, no, you gotta—" Karen tugged him a little closer, wrapped her arms around the front of his chest. One of his hands grabbed her right wrist, squeezed hard.

"This is going to kill me, Karen," he said, slowly and clearly. He sobbed once, then swallowed it down until it returned as a strangled groan. "You understand?"

"It's not."

"It _is_." He sucked in another breath, and his back shuddered against her chest. "If it's this bad already on the outside, it's... it's gonna be a lot worse inside."

"It hasn't even been a day!"

"That tunnel was filthy. That bathroom. It doesn't take that long."

"But you're... you're taking the antibiotics. We gotta... we gotta give them time to work, Foggy." She wanted to shake him for emphasis, but couldn't bring herself to shift him any more than she already had. "Just give it time," she repeated, rubbing a thumb along his shoulder.

"...We haven't got a whole lot of that right now," he said, and his voice was faint and might have sounded half-dead already.

"We'll use what we have, then." Karen shifted, leaning over to grab the bottle of vodka. "Let me clean it at least."

Foggy was already sobbing again, airy and terrified. She set the bottle back down and held him for a while, wanting to rock him, to soothe him, but nothing was going to help, and she knew that. Karen waited it out, just like Foggy would when Matt was upset about something.

None of that helped when she finally got him lying back down, and used the vodka to clean the wound again. As she was hurriedly brushing away the blood and remnants of dirt that she could find, she hoped, for a short and awful moment, that Matt _was_ dead, so that he wouldn't have to hear Foggy's screaming in the tiny space of the derelict bus.

\---

She held him to her chest again, after she was done. They stayed tangled like that for a while, but his strength fled him like she knew it would, and she had to lay him back down. At least she'd found some sheets and blankets; she unpacked them and spread the biggest blanket over him, then let him ball up one of the sheets to put under his head. They smelled like rot and dust. He didn't seem to care, pulling the edge of it up against his unhurt shoulder and dragging a fingernail along the aged pattern sewn into it. A dull echo of his friend.

Outside, the rain picked up, and the wind afterward, howling along the roofs above them. Karen sat down next to Foggy and started going through the rest of what she'd scavenged. The tin cans were at the bottom and she pulled them out first. Her stomach thundered at the prospect of food, no matter what kind. Hell, she'd eat dog food at this point.

Foggy was watching silently, eyes glazed, breaths uneven.

Karen tilted the biggest can around in the light. There was an expiration date stamped on the bottom. It ended with _'2019',_ but she didn't know what year it actually was. She didn't know if December had already come and gone. God, she was so tired. Exhaustion buzzed in her head, hummed heavily behind her eyes. Her whole body felt itchy and her skin felt like it was someone else's.

"Do you think you can eat something?" she asked, looking over at him.

He answered quickly. She was heartened. "...Yeah. I'm fucking starving."

"Me too." She put the can down on the floor, then reached behind her and drew the knife. When she settled the tip on the edge of the can, she heard Foggy shift.

"...Dude... clean that off first," he breathed.

Karen paused, then sluggishly realized that the blade was still covered in dried blood. Matt's fucking blood. She jolted and nearly dropped the damn thing on the floor. "Shit. Yeah. Yeah, sorry." Looking at it made her appetite drain away. _Karen. Karen. Karen._

"What the... what the hell did you stab?"

Acid chewed at the back of her tongue. "A feral. In the tunnels."

Foggy huffed out a breath and shut his eyes. "Use the vodka." It didn't sound like he was giving a damn about any of it, and that only made it worse.

Still, she did what he told her to do, shaking the alcohol off of the blade afterward and drying it with the edge of one of the sheets. The blood was dried and brown, and became an amber smear on the fabric when she wiped it off. She wondered if it was the last of Matt she'd ever see.

It had been far too long. He should have come back to them by now. Stubborn, clingy Matt and his stumbling little voice and endless supply of tiny smiles.

She missed him so fucking much.

Foggy shifted again. "You okay?"

"Uh—yeah," she mumbled. "Tired." Even though it was the truth, she didn't feel any better for having told it. She slid herself closer and settled the edge of the knife along the outer edge of the lid. Karen started wiggling the knife, and Foggy reached out and held the can still for her against the floor. "Thanks," she breathed, pounding the heel of her other hand on the knife handle. This was not her first time around this particular block.

There was a faint hiss as she broke the can's seal and she carved out a small triangle shape of aluminum before setting the knife aside. She gave it a sniff. Foggy watched expectantly.

"I think it's tomato soup," she said. "Concentrated."

She hadn't thought Foggy's face would ever be able to light up under the pressure of all that pain, but there it was, a faint flicker of something that wasn't agony or terror. "Awesome."

Karen opened the can the rest of the way, and then they passed it back and forth in silence, sharing it. A semi-gelatinous orange-red puck that was gone far too quickly, but tasted decent, and afterward she thought she felt a little better. They spent a while dipping their fingers in and getting the last remnants off from against the walls of the can, then Foggy laid his head back down, and Karen dug out some more pain medication for him. She checked his shoulder and his face. They seemed to be all right.

The day slipped through their fingers like sand. He took more antibiotics, more painkillers, slept a lot, didn't talk much. The rain fell harder, fell softer, fell harder, blew in loud rattles against the bus' roof. Karen lost track of most of the late evening, too exhausted to do much else but stare out at nothing and think slow, looping thoughts.

She ended up lying down and curling fetal-position next to him to share the warmth of the blankets. The floor of the bus was rough and entirely unforgiving. Karen felt the exhaustion tugging at her, trying to pull her down, but still she bobbed helplessly above the surface of sleep, unable to go under. It wasn't until Foggy shifted toward her and placed one of his hands on her arms that she finally fell asleep, listening to his shallow breathing in her ear.

\---

_Mud. Mud and ash and black water._

_She's running. The icy mud squelches under her bare feet, in between her numb toes. Air shivers rapidly in and out of her chest. There's blood on her face. There's blood all over her body, dried in some places and fresh in others. It leaves parallel trails of warmth down her face, along the hollow of her neck, travels along the side of her body. Each step hurries it along just a little faster._

_It's agony, her face. Like someone heated a blade and left it balanced between her ear and cheekbone. She knows better than to touch it, but she can feel something moving as if it had been ripped off and only stapled halfway back on. Skin or her ear._

_Roaring, behind her. It leaps through the trees, up into the sky, echoes through the remnants of a Park and the remnants of her thoughts. There is more than one voice there, in the woods and in her head. Too many for her to pick apart; they all coalesce into one terrible din._

_She slips; falls in slow motion. Hands on her body before she hits the ground. The din has been born into a physical plane and it is reaching out, grabbing her, dragging her back to where she didn't want to go. It hurts. Her throat burns as she screams but no sounds come out. She's silent and lost and forgotten._

_There is a figure, now, standing nearby, indifferent to the hands holding her down and tearing her open. The sky rips open behind it, the light of a billion unspeakable heavens throwing it into sharp relief, a permanent shadow._

Karen _, it says._ Karen _._

_No. She doesn't want to be here. She never wanted to be here. This wasn't something she'd ever deserved. Nobody deserved this._

_The mud is ice underneath her._

Karen. Karen.

_She fights and she fights and she fights, with everything in her, every single degree that she could give. It doesn't help. The hands are still there. The sounds are still in her ears. The mud is still cold against her skin._

Karen. Karen. Karen.

_The hands turn suddenly hot, blue-hot, like mercurial interlopers, and she's screaming, and screaming, kicking out, throwing all the strength she has, and the mud was getting warmer, more solid, and she was no longer bleeding, and—_

"Karen! Karen, holy shit, Karen, stop!"

She opened her eyes, heaving for air, blinking rapidly. There were hands on her wrists, and her legs were tangled in something. Panic thrummed in her head, her heart thudding against the fragile bones of her chest, and she twisted and tore herself from whatever was grabbing her, fleeing.

They weren't going to get her again. She wasn't going back there. They couldn't have her anymore.

"Karen," she heard, a pained cry. "Karen, where are you going?!"

Familiar. The voice was familiar. She knew it. Karen stumbled, her hands catching themselves on the back of something. Disintegrating plastic cushions. A seat. The back of a seat in a school bus, and that was Foggy behind her, breathing hard and still calling her name.

A dream. She'd been dreaming.

"Oh, God," she felt herself say. It didn't sound quite right. Her legs buckled; she fell back and landed in the seat behind her. "Oh, God." The images were still thrumming behind her eyes; she pressed the heels of her hands to them until strange white and green patterns blazed across the darkness of her eyelids.

"Karen," Foggy said, again, from the back of the bus.

She didn't respond, just pushed harder against her eyes, trying to drive the pictures out. It never did anything. God, she could still feel the mud between her toes. Her stomach felt like it was fluttering and she didn't understand what it was until she started sobbing, curling into herself, pulling her legs up onto the seat and pushing her knees against the back of her hands.

Foggy was panting and struggling in the back of the bus, she could hear him. His voice was broken. "Hey—can you t-talk to me? Karen. Karen!"

That buzzing emptiness tried to fill her head again, the one she'd been living in for nearly two years—until two men had slipped behind her defenses and took sledgehammers to the whole construct. She fought it. She didn't want to go back to that. It wasn't life—it wasn't _her_ life, not the one she wanted to live.

It happened anyway. The memories left, but so did everything else. Her head buzzed. Empty, empty, empty. Someone had pulled the drain in her and everything had been swept out. She slowly stopped sobbing, and started to take deeper, more even breaths.

"Karen, you need to talk to me. Please. _Please_ , K—"

"I'm fine," she said, and her voice matched the evaporated contents of her mind. She knew why. Her body did whatever it needed to do to stop the memories from tearing it apart. That didn't mean she wanted it. "I'm fine, Foggy."

His breaths were coming faster. "I'm not."

That roused her. Finally. She let her brain latch onto it, let the worry for him overtake the ambivalence toward herself, and lowered her hands from her face before getting up off of the bus seat. Her feet carried her automatically, stiff and graceless.

Foggy was half-curled on the bus' floor, like he'd tried to get to her and aborted the action halfway through. It reminded her of Matt, when she'd hit him with a tranquilizer in the Park. Trying so hard to get away, to do something, but their limits couldn't be breached even if it seemed like Matt didn't have any. Foggy was shivering and sweating, and his skin was pale. Paler than it had been before. The worry settling through her mind twisted and froze into something worse. Fear.

Her mouth was dry as she bent down next to him, lifting him carefully by his shoulders to get him back into a supine position. He seemed to choke on a howl and a hundred other noises of pain that were trying to come out of him when he was moved. His face was pale, his expression twisted and made unfamiliar with pain.

Karen, stupidly, opened her mouth, and the dead words fell out before she could stop them. "Are you okay?"

Foggy coughed—or tried to laugh—and glared at her with glazed, half-hooded eyes. "...The fuck's it look like? I need th... the meds." He heaved for breath, swallowed heavily four or five times. "Are _you_ okay?"

"I'm fine," she repeated, and cast around for the medication.

He scoffed. He didn't believe her. "You were sc... screaming."

Karen hummed. Not a surprise. It had been a long time since she'd had such a bad dream. And that was all it was. Everyone had them. She just hadn't been strong enough to stop it from taking over this time.

"Karen," he panted, still looking for answers.

She came back with the painkillers, the antibiotics, the Tylenol. The water in the spent alcohol bottle. They'd gone through the first bottle-full, and now she was filling it with what she'd collected in the Ziploc. "Here, take these."

Foggy was still glaring, but he reached out and took the painkillers and Tylenol first, his trembling actions telling her just how bad the pain was. Of course it was bad. He could barely fucking breathe through it. His face twitched at the taste of the antibiotics, but he swallowed them, too, then laid back down.

She stared at him without really seeing him, trying to will the life back into her head. Where had it gone? How had she gotten it back before?

After a few minutes, Foggy ground out speech through his taut jaw. "Don't lie to me."

Her tongue felt disconnected from the rest of her. "...About what?"

Even through the hazy agony in his gaze, his eyes still surprised her with just how much they saw. Surprise. That was an emotion. That was something. She clung to it, gluttonous and seeking more.

"You had a n... a nightmare so bad you... got up and... tried to run. Don't... don't... don't tell me you're _fine_."

"I had a bad dream. We all have bad dreams."

"Do you... do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

He let out a soft grunt and a shivering sigh of... _disappointment_. And why wouldn't he be, after taking down the wall she'd built around herself, brick-by-brick, just to have her shy away from him and dig a deeper hole to hide within.

They sat in an awkward silence, because Karen was very skilled at creating them, and listened to the rain outside. His breathing started to even out as the painkillers started working, but it never went near anything she would consider normal. Still, it eased the worry she'd allowed into her head, leaving room for the things that she was trying to reclaim.

God, she'd never hated anything as much as she hated this.

Karen stared through the glass door of the emergency exit, her eyes idly tracing the colorless features of the alleyway. She'd stared at it a lot over the past day or so. There was a smudged handprint on the glass near the door handle. She idly wondered who had left it there, and when.

Eventually, Foggy spoke up. "...Can you... help me look at it again?"

Karen nodded, shifting toward him. She laid her hands on his shoulders and startled when she realized she could feel the warmth of his skin all the way through his clothes. Her expression got tangled up in itself in worry as she put one hand on his forehead. His skin was dry, flushed, far too hot. "...You have a fever," she breathed.

"I know." He sounded neither surprised or worried. "Lift... lift me up."

She didn't really want to. She didn't want him to see it and she didn't want to see it herself, but she did it because he'd asked, and because she couldn't curl up and hide from the world. That wouldn't fix anything. She had to open her fucking eyes and face it. Nothing was going to make it easier to peel back the blanket and the bandage.

Karen steeled herself and did it anyway, hitching him up against her chest like the last time. He'd lost the strength to scream about it and only made an extended shuddering moan as she reached her arms past his, carefully pulling the gauze away from his leg. The noises he was making in lieu of screaming were so, so much more terrifying.

The wound was awful. Swollen and inflamed. Yellowing pus on the edges, clotting up in the bandages. When he leaned down to look, he had to keep pausing to blink the tears out of his eyes. Her heart was suffocating itself in her chest.

She shouldn't have let that worry into her head. She should have walled it off like she'd walled off everything else. Now it was _everything_. It was in her limbs and in her mouth and in her words when she spoke. "...It's still infected."

"Yeah," he said, on a defeated, outward breath.

 _No._ "You're taking antibiotics."

"And... and they aren't helping. Not this time."

 _No no no._ "I'll go out. I'll find something else," she said, desperate. "We... we can..." and she trailed off, because no, they couldn't. He was right. It felt like all her insides had left her and been replaced with nothing but icy air. "There has to be something we can do."

"I can't... it's... it's not..." he sighed, shook his head. It took him a long while to spit out his next words, low and weak, "...I'm sorry, Karen. It's... it's over."

They rang with finality, seemed to echo around the cramped space of the bus and turn into something else. _No, no, no!_  Not possible. She couldn't lose both of them. Her fucking family. Her fucking _family._

Movement jolted her and it had to happen a couple more times before she realized it came from herself. She was crying. How something could hurt so badly, she had no idea. Her head was ablaze again, memory and feeling, but it was only memories of him—a smile, a short laugh, a quiet interaction with Matt that she'd spied on and tucked greedily away in her mind.

"There's got to be something else," she repeated.

"There isn't anything else."

"I can... what if I... what if we went to Yonkers? They have supplies. They can help."

"...And how am I supposed to... get there?"

"I don't know!" she wailed, lost.

"I'd d... I'd die before we got there. It's not... gonna take long."

"You're a fucking doctor! You need to think of something!"

No. He was done. His voice was empty. "Karen, I'm sorry," he said again, leaning his head back, trying to make some kind of connection. She rested her temple against his for a moment, then felt her face crumble, and buried it in his unhurt shoulder to hide it even though nobody was looking. He kept squeezing her wrist, and leaned his head on hers. "I'm so sorry."

Karen just clutched him tighter, as tight as she possibly could, like her arms alone could wall off the infection and the pain and keep him safe, keep him at her side. But her arms weren't broad or wide or particularly strong, and they hadn't been enough to save anyone or anything. They'd never be enough. _She'd_ never be enough. She couldn't even save herself.

The brick wall she'd built around herself phased away, because it had only been an illusion to start with. The hole she'd dug wasn't enough to hide in. All of their fighting, their struggle to survive when all they had in their hands was blood and dust, Matt and Foggy yanking her back from that cliff-edge she'd made of herself, both of them putting her together, putting _themselves_ together—all of that, and Foggy was still heedlessly slipping right into his best friend's shadow, following him down to a place neither of them would return from.

And she couldn't do a fucking thing about it.

So she stayed where she was, held him against her chest, and cried against his shoulder. He kept rubbing her wrist, almost automatically, his sobs rocking through her and hers rocking through him.

"I want Matt," he whispered, like a lost child.

Karen held him tighter. Only the rain responded.


	26. fragile (part two)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for non-explicit discussion of rape/non-con.

Hours passed. He got worse and worse.

The Tylenol stopped working. The tramadol wasn't even touching it anymore. By the afternoon, he was soaked with sweat and unable to catch his breath between his awful gasps of pain.

Karen kept herself at his side. She didn't talk much. Her head was a confusing mess, much like after she'd broken down in the apartment. Like when she'd left all she knew about herself in a subway tunnel, years ago. All of her thoughts were chaotic, uprooted, tossed around and mixed in with that awful piercing dread and worry, so fucking cold that it was starting to _burn_.

It had to be early afternoon when she glanced over and saw him staring out of the emergency exit window. She didn't think he'd stopped crying at all since seeing the state of his leg. Her hand was on his arm but her fingers weren't moving, she just let it sit there, and he didn't push her away, so that was where it had stayed.

The choking tar in her head ebbed and churned, flooded up alongside all of her thoughts of him, thrummed hot and wild like his infected leg. She just wanted it out, even if it didn't do anything to help. She wanted it _out_.

So she opened her mouth. "Foggy?"

He blinked a few times, sniffed once, and turned his face toward her. He didn't say anything—his jaw was clenched too tightly to allow out any words.

Without even thinking about it, she started to speak, knowing she was nearly being drowned out by the sound of the rain hitting the bus roof. She didn't really care.

Someone needed to know. She was grateful she had a choice about who to say it to. Of course it was Foggy, because he claimed to understand, and even if he didn't, he _deserved_ to know. Even if he died tomorrow. Even if he died that night. He'd been so patient with her.

She had to be quick. He needed to know before he could never know anything ever again.

The memories thrashed in her head, more savage than the animals that had caused them. She needed to bring it to the surface, pin it down and burn it alive in the sunshine so that it would finally fucking die. And even if the light didn't kill it, at least she would have still let it out, let it go somewhere besides letting it scuttle and claw in the dead ends of her own fucking mind.

Her voice was very soft.

"They took me."

Foggy shifted again, finally spoke. "...What?"

She pushed out a breath. "The ferals. In the Park. They took me." She looked at him, not really seeing him, or anything but the ghosts behind her eyelids. "For three days."

He stared at her. His eyes were swimming.

She kept going. "They never..." she took another breath, tried to center it in herself. "They never... they never bit me. Like I was... something special. Because I wasn't infected."

Foggy reached out, pushed a hand over her arm, rubbed at her elbow with his thumb. He didn't talk. What could he even say? Karen didn't even know if she wanted to hear him say anything at all. She put a hand on his shoulder, then shifted closer, settled his head in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair.

He tangled his hand in her free one and didn't let go.

"They kept me tied... tied up. Against a tree. It was... it was very cold."

Karen focused on the movements of her fingers as she spoke, idly untangling the knots she could find in his hair. Her voice bubbled out of her, weak yet steel-shorn, her words agony but her throat as strong as it had ever been. It shocked her. It absolved her. "They... they took... turns. With me. Fought about it. They..." she swallowed again, reflexively, "...I can't believe I... I lived through it. I didn't... I didn't really..."

Foggy's hand tightened its grip. He opened his mouth, and she feared what he would say, something pitying, an  _'I'm sorry'_ or a _'It's going to be okay'_ or some stupid, stupid joke. Like all those empty voices at the shelter. Dull condolences that meant nothing because they hadn't known a goddamn thing about it.

"I'm here," is what he told her, and he shifted further toward her. It was hard to hug someone when they were in your lap. It was hard to get closer when so many pieces of him were broken. "I'm here, Karen."

Another swallow. She hadn't even realized it, but she was crying, tears silently roving down her face, pooling at the hollow of her throat, as cold as anything. She didn't reach up to wipe them away because she didn't want to take her fingers out of his hair, didn't want to have control of her hands because she didn't know what she would do to herself.

She just kept talking. Low but steady. Faint but strong. She didn't know where the strength was coming from. She didn't even know she'd had it, but there it was. Just hidden away. Sealed behind a door. Waiting to be uncovered.

"I used to wish that... that they'd killed me, out there. But I... I got loose. The alpha caught me. He had one of those big knives. Machete." She paused a second, gathering the words together carefully so that they wouldn't tumble out of her all at once. "I'd never felt anything so... so painful. You know? That knife. The... what they... what they did to me." She gestured toward the gulch that had been torn across her face. Foggy's hand was rubbing random circles in her palm.

"I don't think the alpha was... was expecting me to... get back up. But... but I did, and I... I had a rock. Hit him in the head with it." She could still feel the rough texture on her palm, the hot blood sticky between her fingers. She replaced it with the sensation of Foggy's hair and his hand in hers. Soft and harmless. Filthy gold flowing through her fingertips. "I took the knife. I c—..."

A sob broke from her, rough and sudden, but it didn't hurt. It felt like it drove a crack in her, and the crack released just an iota of that endless, painful pressure in her head. A fraction of that tar-black mess was leaving, too. It was something. It felt like liberation after so long, all those empty months, that she was allowing some of it to seep past her poorly-built seal.

Because someone was listening to her. Someone fucking _cared._

But she swallowed again, breathed for a moment. "I cut his head off. The alpha." But not all at once, no, that wasn't how human anatomy worked. And he was dead after the second strike, but still she'd swung. She could still feel the vibration of the blows, metal hitting bone. Over and over. And all she'd wanted to do was continue.

But, "...I ran, after that. Back to... to the shelter. They thought I was dead. Didn't come looking for me. Didn't expect to see me again." That was the way the world worked. Say goodbye to the things that might be lost, because they might never come back. Learn to let go of everything you have at a moment's notice.

"I was... I was different, after that. Worse than... than before. Then Eric came, and... and I just... it was so easy, you know? To just... let him choose everything. What to do. Who to talk to."

Foggy was staring up at her, blinking slowly. A few times, his breathing quickened, like he was about to say something, but nothing ever came out.

"When you... when Jack found you... I was confused, and... and I didn't know what to do." Her fingers were working on a bigger tangle, now, and she pulled her other hand out of his to get at it easier. "And you were so... _whole_. You always knew what to say."

His voice stirred air against her chin. "I was guessing."

"Liar." Something was pulling at her face. A smile. She was smiling, despite what she'd just let out of her head and shown to him. Or maybe because of it. He wasn't disgusted or uncomfortable. Just pained—his agony and her own. She spoke the thought that was in her head instead of keeping it caged. "...What'd I do to deserve someone like you?"

The ever-living ghost of his wide grin passed momentarily across his face. "You had... really good references."

And despite it all, she laughed. It was broken and sounded strange, but it was hers. For a too-short second, the ghost on Foggy's face came to life, and he was grinning back at her. But it died like all things do, and he went back to dragging in heavy breaths and swallowing back those soft sounds of pain.

Still, he tangled his fingers back in hers, and squeezed as hard as he could. She squeezed back.

The day ended. She slept next to him and did not dream.

\---

Foggy spoke quietly into the frozen morning air after he'd taken the worthless medication and waited an hour for the pain to fade. It didn't, even when he doubled the dosage. All it did was make him nauseated. They were nearly out of water.

He was laying down with his head back in her lap, staring out the emergency exit window.

"I thought of something else."

Her heart pounded against her ribcage. "What is it? What do I have to do?" God, she'd do anything. _Anything_.

"Karen." His voice was so frail. She'd never heard his voice so weak and empty. It sounded like everything inside of him had been cut open and ripped out.

"What is it?" She brushed her fingers over his clammy forehead, his grey skin, and along the hair at his temple. The rain rattled against the roof of the bus. "I'm here. Tell me what to do."

"I think..." he forced out a breath, but it seemed to get trapped behind his teeth for an eternity. "...I think it... it needs to come off."

Karen knew what he was saying. She feigned ignorance because she wanted to be wrong. She wanted so _fucking badly_ to be wrong. "What does?"

He shifted again, and agony drew his face tight and his words tighter. "The leg."

All she'd wanted was to be wrong. "I... I can't... I can't do that."

He coughed once, sucked in a weak breath. His eyes were so glazed and he was so feverish that she wasn't even sure if he was seeing her or not. "Karen. I need you to... to listen. Okay? Listen to me. Please."

She swallowed, leaned in close. Her eyes hurt and her chest was tight and raw and painful. It'd been like that for so long she wondered how it wasn't calloused. "I'm listening."

"If you don't cut it off, the infection is going to... to spread. F-fast. It'll go to my heart a-and... and I'll be dead in an... in... in an hour. Do you understand?" He was reaching out clumsily with one hand; she grabbed it, held it tightly. Foggy's eyes flitted around like Matt's, red with fresh tears. His breathing grew a bit more rapid, a bit more shallow. "It-it's gotta be my best ch-chance."

Karen shook her head once. "I don't know how."

Foggy made a weak huff through his nose, then sniffed. "It's okay. I read about how... how to do it. In a book. Once. Can't be too h... hard." His expression twisted up again, his eyes squeezed shut and he let out a heavy sob. "Jesus, it hurts, Karen."

She leaned forward, kept her arm under his shoulders, held him close as he shuddered and rode out the pain. "I know. It's okay. I got you."

It always took ages, but eventually he let out a heavy sigh, took in a deep breath, repeated the process for a while. His eyes opened and they were redder, that time. He tried to talk, got his words caught up on something in his throat, cleared it with a damp noise. "...'Kay, you listening? Get... get my duffel. The notebook. Write it down. Don't want you to... to fuck it up."

She dug through the bag to find it. The pen was stuck inside the spiral of metal binding the pages together. She flipped past the plateaus, past the inventory lists, found an empty page. There was no way this was really happening. This had to be a fucking hallucination.

But Foggy opened his mouth, and talked, and she took up the pen, and wrote it down.

"You'll need to put a tourniquet on. You can... you can use my belt. Tightly. It'll stop me from bleeding out."

Karen wrote quickly, careful to put down every word he said.

"There's... should be a... the surgical kit. Wrapped in fabric. There's a scalpel in there. Use that. You'll want... I think you'll want to cut a little above the... where the break is. The bones." He winced, hard, pressed his face against her arm for a second. "They'll... the infection is prob... probably in them, too. You need a... uh..." he trailed off.

She waited and waited. He didn't supply anything else. Karen spoke impatiently. "I'll need a what?"

"S... something that can cut through... through bone."

"A saw?" She was going to throw up.

Foggy just nodded, gesturing to the leg, so swollen and ruined now. The sick-sweet smell of infection was heady in the muggy air of the bus. "Cut, uh... above the break. The bone's gotta... gotta be infected, too."

"I can't do this while you're awake," she said, shaking her head again.

"No, you can't." He clenched his jaw and took a minute to unclench it so he could talk again. "The ketamine."

"But that—"

"It's for Matt. I know. But he isn't here." His voice broke on the last word; he hurried to repair it and only got halfway there. "I weigh more than... than him. So... that's..." he paused and thought a minute, and even that seemed like torture. "Six mils. Put it, uh, in my thigh. Where there's muscle. It's a sedative only, Karen, so you... you'll have to tie me up or s-something. Like with Matt. Remember?"

"Yeah. I remember."

"Okay, s-so you'll remember when he came out of it. I'll probably be... be the same. _If_ I come out of it."

"You will," Karen said, suddenly loud and strong. "You will. I'll make sure you do."

A weak smile flashed across his face for a too-short second. "The pen." He waggled his hand in a 'write' sign. "Uh... you'll have to... to seal up the vessels when you cut them. The arteries. If you don't, I'll... I'll bleed out when you... you take off the tourniquet. Use the... that suture in the... the blue pack. It'll... it'll dissolve. Inside." He reached for the bag with a shuddering hand, and she paused writing and tugged it closer. Grunting, he dug around inside, pulling out the suture he kept in the vial with alcohol. "This. This one, use it on the... the outside."

Jesus, where had he learned all this shit? Was it all from studying, the hours and hours and hours he'd spent reading at the apartment?

He paused to catch his breath, then kept right on going, "The bone left behind, you'll need to... I think... file it down."

Karen was writing as fast as she could. She didn't know if he would have the time to repeat the instructions if she left anything out. Blanching at the word 'file', she looked at him. "With what?"

"Don't got a file, so... probably the scalpel. When you've..." he waved vaguely to his ruined limb, "...finished all the cutting."

"Jesus."

"I know. I don't en... envy you. After that, you'll have to sort of... take the skin and... seal it up. Then sutures. I showed you... showed you how to do them correctly. Like a... like a sock seam."

"A sock seam."

Foggy grunted. "I'll... I'll draw it. Give me the..." he reached for the notebook. She relinquished it, and watched as he drew an awful diagram in shaking lines. From memory. He even seemed to know where the arteries were. "Thank... thank God for... for medical texts," he tried to joke. It fell flat because he was fucking drawing her a fucking manual for cutting his fucking leg off and folding the skin back together _like a fucking set of drapes_.

Oh, she was going to throw up.

"Like that," he said, and gave back the notebook. She took it with numb hands.

It was a horrible picture. She didn't want to look at it at all, but she knew she'd be studying it as hard as she could pretty fucking soon.

"If I'm going to walk again, I need to... y'know... be able to put it in something. That's what my books t-told me."

"A prosthetic?"

Foggy let out a cough of a laugh. "If I live that long."

"Don't joke."

"...Sorry."

"What do I do next?"

"That's about the gist of it." He sighed. "Read it back to me."

Karen nodded, and did so. Foggy listened, leaning hard against her arm again, breaths shaking out of him, like her dictation was scaring him more than his own. Maybe it was. He was sobbing again by the time she was done, shoulders rolling weak and slow. She held him against her chest, feeling his terror thrum with her own.

Foggy spoke after a while, a half-whisper into her sweater. "I wish Matt were here."

"I know you do."

"Do you... think he's... dead?"

_Yes_. "I don't know."

"I just wanted to... to see him again. Before. If I don't come..." he shuddered, rubbed his face on her shirt. "...If it doesn't... y'know... can you... you'll take care of him, right? If he comes back?"

The lie hurt. It hurt so badly. "He'll come back. He'll come back for you, Foggy."

He shuddered even harder at those words, let out another wet sob. "Please take care of him, Karen. Please. Don't make him be alone. Don't make him live that life. Please, Karen, please, _please_."

"I'll take care of him."

He sounded delirious. His skin was red and hot and his eyes were rolling around aimlessly. "Keep him."

"I'll keep him. I promise, Foggy."

"Someone needs to..." he started, and then stopped. He swallowed, and said something else, but she couldn't make sense of it. His voice was garbled, and she had to look simply on reflex to make sure his left hand wasn't shaking. No, he was shaking all over. The fever.

"Foggy," she whispered.

"A saw," he slurred. Oh, God. He _was_ delirious.

They were running out of time.

Karen gently slid him down to the floor and extracted herself from underneath him. He mumbled something about Matt, but she couldn't listen. Her hands were shaking. Fuck, she couldn't do this. And Foggy had complained about pulling a fucking tooth. He wasn't about to saw a fucking leg off.

She made to get to her feet, but paused and leaned down, pressing her lips to his cold, clammy forehead.

"I'll be back," she whispered, then took a last sip of water before leaving.

\---

Karen went as fast as she could, moving in and out of buildings, digging around. It was like a needle in a goddamn haystack, finding anything specific in the landfill New York had become. She dug through the row of houses she'd scavenged at the day before, but most everything was buried under rubble. Trying to focus on finding garages or workshops, some place that would actually have a goddamn saw, she moved down the block, on to the next one. The rain fell all around her.

Under the eaves of a bodega, she paused, trying to calm down and catch her breath. The second she stool still, she felt the tears pooling in her eyes, stinging at the corners. No, no. No time. Foggy didn't have time for her to stand in a fucking bodega and cry.

It happened anyway.

And she hated herself, so fucking much, for being unable to stop. Forcing down the sobs so she wouldn't make so much noise, she started moving, blinking away the tears, shaking her head when they kept coming back over and over.

Another street. She didn't find anything. She couldn't stop crying.

Karen took a left, following the corner of the block around with the intent to circle back to where she'd started. She couldn't go too far on her own. Not with just a knife.

She was so fucked up that she wasn't even giving the buildings a close enough look, prompting her to backtrack, and search again, and she started crying harder in frustration at herself. Useless fucking bitch. Foggy was probably going to die while she was out fumbling around in the rubble.

Halfway down the next street, there was a loud clatter. Karen jumped about fifty fucking feet in the air, whirling around. The tears were gone in an instant, the sobs died out to make room for reflex and instinct. Jesus, not a fucking feral. She didn't fucking need this right now.

Swallowing, she drew her knife, and drifted toward the source of the noise. One of the many old houses that lined the block. Its back end had collapsed, but its garage still stood. She looked around, but couldn't find anything moving. A feral would have jumped her by now. Had the wind just knocked something over?

As she got closer, she could see a small pile of broom and mop handles on the floor, and she sighed. Of course. Karen rubbed her face, ignored the sting of the rain and her returning tears, and peered closer into the garage. There was some kind of workbench inside, overturned, but maybe...

A swirl of dampness and the smell of the river followed her into the garage. Her feet created mud from the dust on the floor, debris from the street seeping into the building like so much unmanaged trash. There was a table with three of its legs buckled, tilting its contents down to the floor and against the wall. Karen knelt down, pushing aside random objects—cables, books, torn plastic sheeting. She dug through the pile and found nothing useful.

Standing, she paused for a few seconds, chewing at a scab on her knuckle, listening to the rain hiss and patter outside. Her eyes hurt. God, everything hurt. She had to hurry.

Karen sighed and moved further inside, carefully jostling the nearest door until it opened. A storage area of some kind. She shoved the door open all the way to capture the light from outside, slipping further in and casting her eyes around. A sitting freezer in one corner, a smell hovering around it that nearly matched that of the river. She didn't dare to open it.

On the walls hung a slab of particleboard, with tools dangling from neatly-placed nails—screwdrivers, wrenches of all sizes and shapes. Some of them had been knocked to the floor; she toed them out of the way as she leaned in closer, brushed the dust off of something that hung near the center of the particleboard.

Shiny aluminum and her own distorted reflection met her gaze and she sighed, pulling it down off of the wall. A hacksaw. Meant for tree branches or two-by-fours, not a human body. Not her friend.

Karen stood in the middle of the room and wiped it clean with her jacket sleeve. The teeth were sharp and bright; it looked like it hadn't seen much use before the world collapsed. She turned it over in her hands, studying it, testing her grip on the handle. When she made an awkward sawing motion at the air, just to see what it would feel like, her stomach turned and she had to stop and swallow for a long time to prevent herself from vomiting. The smell from the rotted freezer clung to the inside of her nose. Saliva flooded her mouth again and again.

She couldn't do this.

She couldn't, but she turned to the garage door anyway, casting one last look over the walls of the storage room. Nothing that she could use. Not right now. If Foggy survived, she could go back. Find something to take home with her. Something that wouldn't be used to tear apart a thing she'd never wanted to lose.

Karen stuck the hacksaw under her jacket to protect it from the rain, and began the trek back to the school bus. The wind clawed at the back of her neck. She let it happen.

\---

When she finally got back to their sad little campsite, something caught her eye. It was sitting on the dashboard of a nearby sedan with broken windows, shielded from the rain by the intact windshield. Box-shaped, wrapped in a black trash bag.

Karen looked around, pressing the saw close to herself under her jacket and tucking it under her armpit. She reached over and brought the thing into her hands. It was a large shoebox, wrapped poorly with the bag. When she pushed the plastic off and opened the lid, she found three bottles of water, a container of rubbing alcohol, four tiny tealight candles, and a pair of gloves. She lifted her head, glancing around and speaking quietly, on reflex.

"...Matt?"

Only the soft hissing whisper of the wind answered her.

She shook her head, placing the box back where she'd found it, setting the hacksaw down next to it. Bundling her jacket around her, she stepped further down the alleyway that the bus was half-parked into. There was no sign of anyone, nothing moving, no noises.

Her heart was starting to surge in her chest, pounding incessantly. Nobody else would be leaving them things. There was only a single conclusion she could come to, even in her own ruined head, where everything was empty and cynical and devoid of a single source of light.

"Matt?" she whispered again. "Matt, are you out here?"

No answer, but her mind was answering for her. He was alive. She hadn't killed him. He was alive and _moving_ , gathering things, scavenging, just like her. Was he still nearby? Waiting or hiding? Karen found herself wiping her face, pausing to lean hard against the wall of the building next to her. It was relief, this feeling. She knew it. She was so glad to have it.

Karen slowly lifted her head and talked again. If he was nearby, he would hear her. "I'm sorry," she said, and never before had the words been more truthful coming out of her mouth. "Please come back."

There was only the rain, hissing formless accusations in her ears.

She shook her head and moved back to the bus, gathering up the saw and the box on her way through. Foggy was still alive, but no longer responding. Sweating through his clothes, his skin a strange mix of paper-white and fever red, whimpering and shifting around. Karen lit one of the candles and coaxed some of the water into him. It was clean—the bottles had been sealed. She hadn't seen a sealed bottle of water in years. Where had Matt found them?

And why had he given them to _her_ , of all people?

Karen sat in her spot at Foggy's side and fiddled with the gloves, and after a while, started crying, tiny sniffles at first, but it grew and grew until the sobs were harder and heavier than she'd ever spit out in her life. Not even in the subway tunnel when the sky tore open.

The voice that roared in her head wasn't her own. She wished it was.

_Stop crying. Stop. You need to help him—_

She kept crying. Nobody asked if she was okay. Nobody laid a comforting hand on her shoulder or mumbled nonsensical platitudes in her direction. It was cold and dark and she was alone. She would always be alone. All of this shit was a lie, a distraction. A falsehood. A mask. And it had gone the same way it had come.

_Stop. Pick yourself up. He'll die if you don't—_

She should have known better than to get used to it, to get attached. God, she should have known better. She should have run when she'd had the chance. But she found that she would gladly do it all over again just to avoid turning into that empty shell. To prevent herself from being Paige ever again.

_Get up—_

Karen sat and cried into her knees, alone, listening to the hiss of the distant rain. She cried until there was nothing left in her to let out. An echo of the girl who'd lost herself in a subway the night the world had broken in half. And just like the last time, she didn't have anything to fill the empty places in herself. Foggy was going to die right at her feet, and Matt was never coming back, and she was to blame for all of it.

_Get up get up get up—_

No. No, it didn't have to be this way. She was stronger than all of this. She knew that.

_Good. Get up. You can do this—_

And she had to act _now_ , or he was going to die _tonight_.

So she took the hacksaw and removed the blade, then curved it around itself and stuck it in the Ziploc with some of the rubbing alcohol. She hunted down the ketamine and drew up the dosage. She injected it where Foggy told her to, and he flinched weakly at the needle, but nothing else. She pulled everything together, opened the notebook and leaned it against the bus wall, took up the surgery kit and unwrapped it. She tugged back the blanket and the gauze, and Foggy didn't shift or move at all as she tapped her fingers around the wound, then moved her hands up to the space between the break and his knee. She took his belt and tightened it around his thigh as much as she could. She took her own and bound his hands with it.

_You can do this. You can do this._

Karen soaked the area with the alcohol, then rubbed it into her own hands, shaking off the excess. The rain started to fall harder, rattling above her. She picked up the scalpel. The blade glittered in the half-light.

"I can do this," she said, to nobody.

She took a breath, attempting to fortify herself, but everything was just crumbling, crumbling. A pile at her feet. She adjusted her grip on the scalpel handle, blew the air out of her lungs, and started cutting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _For all those born beneath an angry star..._  
>  _...Lest we forget how fragile we are._  
>  Sting


	27. the funeral

It took three hours.

There was blood everywhere, on her hands, splashed up her arms. Her eyes hurt from reading and re-reading his instructions—over and over and back to front and forwards and fucking backwards—before every cut, every single movement that she made. The scalpel blade had long grown dull. Her hands ached and wouldn't stop shaking; her joints were sluggish and grinding against each other.

The arteries had been a nightmare. The first one she'd severed had spit across her face. She didn't know blood could be so warm. Or slick. She'd lost her grip on the arteries and the scalpel and the forceps more than a few times before she'd been able to sew them shut. Her heart was still pounding with the fear that she'd lose them permanently and Foggy would bleed out on the floor in front of her. They'd been the hardest.

Well, no. Actually, the hardest part had definitely been the sawing. God, the noise it had made. The way the handle of the saw had vibrated against her palm. Foggy making weak noises under his breath, jerking and panting and worthlessly kicking at nothing with the leg that worked while she begged for him not to wake up, _don't wake up, just stay asleep, please just stay asleep, Foggy_. She knew he could still feel pain despite the ketamine. Matt could, too, when he'd gotten that damned abscess.

She'd never forget that tense few minutes after she removed the tourniquet, waiting to see if the blood would bubble out of him, drain and drain until there was nothing left and he was just a broken shell on the floor of a fucking school bus. She didn't know a human's heart could beat as fast and hard as hers had. It had rattled around in her head and overtaken even the sound of the rain. But the noise of it faded, because he didn't bleed out, she hadn't fucked it up, and that was the most surprising thing about the entire fucking experience.

Karen wondered, afterward, what it felt like to lose something like that, something as important and familiar as a limb. Then she stepped outside the bus and vomited for a half-hour.

The water tasted even more bitter on the way up and out of her, but the smell of the dead rain was slightly more tolerable than the composite scent of bodily fluids and blood and infection that had built up inside the bus.

She'd gathered up what she'd taken off of him into one of the sheets she'd found, and put it on the driver's seat. If she left it outside, it might be discovered, and they didn't need a feral attack right now. They also didn't need Matt to find it. Karen figured if he was close, he'd listened in, although why he hadn't come charging in at the scent of Foggy's blood was a mystery.

Or not. In the back of her mind, she knew why. He was afraid. Of her. And why wouldn't he be? She'd _stabbed_ him. She'd treated him like garbage for so long, when they'd started living together. Over time, they'd grown closer, but never close enough for her to stop being afraid. All of that was instinct, she knew, uncontrollable, but she could have tried harder. She could have apologized to him months ago instead of just the other day. She'd only done it because she'd been terrified he would die right there at her side.

Now she was just whispering into the wind, _I'm sorry Matt, I'm so, so sorry,_ hoping he'd hear it, hoping he'd forgive her. Again. There was never an answer. No distant noises. Nothing. She wondered if he'd simply dropped off the supplies and left for good.

Where would he even go? Brooklyn was his home. There were always the nearby packs, but she knew he wouldn't fit into them. He was too tame, too human. That wasn't where Matt belonged. He was half in her world and half in the other—and unwelcome in both. What was _that_ like?

Jesus, she was so fucking tired.

Shivering, Karen sat on the bottom stair of the bus, leaving the door open to listen to Foggy, and wiped her face clean with one of the dish rags she'd found. God, the blood. It was hard to get out. She missed their purifier, their shitty jury-rigged shower. She missed everything about that dumpy little apartment. For so long, she'd dreaded going to it, knowing she'd be living with Eric. Now she found that she didn't really want to be anywhere else.

She sighed and pulled her legs up against her chest, rubbing her forehead on her knees. Her arms hurt from the sawing and her back twinged from staying bent over for so long. Karen dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. The nightmare from the other night was so far out of her mind that she should have been grateful, but it had been replaced by the surgery and that was just as bad. Maybe even worse, because she could handle her own pain, but someone else's? Foggy's? Fucking impossible.

Karen tucked her arms in between her legs and her chest, trying to warm her freezing, blood-stained hands. She'd given them a rudimentary cleaning, but she didn't want to waste what little water she had. Her eyes burned, but nothing came from them. Underneath her sweater, she could feel the whistle hanging from its chain. She pushed her thumb over it with a reflexive familiarity, having long memorized its shape.

After a minute, she dug it out from under her clothes, fiddling with it. A few times, she stuck it between her lips, but didn't blow, and she couldn't figure out why. Too afraid to own up to what she'd done, maybe. Terrified to see how badly she'd hurt him.

A sound from behind her made her jump; she stuffed the whistle back behind her sweater and got shakily to her feet. Foggy, it was Foggy. She clenched her fists before moving down the length of the bus, ignoring the painful way her heart thudded against her chest.

He was curled up on his side, how she'd left him. Recovery position. What a funny thing, for it to be named after something that might never happen. Foggy had moved a bit, she thought; he was breathing hard and pushing one hand over the floor. Was he trying to get up?

Karen knelt down next to him, trying to remember the steps he'd taken when Matt had come out of it, all those weeks ago. He'd been disoriented, and he'd thrown up, and hallucinated at the back of her couch before trying and failing to bolt. Not in that order.

It didn't help that she hadn't been paying that close attention, back then. Her stupid fucking dismissal. She wanted to go back and slap herself for not caring.

Chewing on her bottom lip so hard that it'd be scabbed later, she gently lifted Foggy's head so she could pillow it in her lap. He reacted with a sudden, graceless violence, swiping out at her without any semblance of accuracy, a sharp, frightened wail in his mouth. His eyes rolled around, wild and terrified and totally fucking out of it.

She held him tightly so he wouldn't shift around. "Shh, shh. It's me. It's Karen."

He tried to talk but only got halfway through a _No_ before a sob spilled out of his throat and quashed the rest of the word. Panting, he attempted to twist out of her grasp, but his strength was gone, and she didn't know how to give it back to him.

Karen brushed a hand over his forehead—he was still far too warm, he still had a fever, God—and he flinched hard, swinging at her again, barely missing her chin. She leaned away from it, whispering desperately, trying not to get the attention of anything that could be lingering nearby. "It's okay! It's just me! Foggy, it's Karen!"

"No, no," he whined, scrabbling his fingers on the floor, trying to get away. She held him with one arm against his chest, and wanted to pull him closer, but his remaining leg was kicking out and she didn't want him to drag the end of the other one across the floor. "Ge'off!" His voice was a slur, a lot like Matt's had been. "Fu'off!"

She was trying to keep her voice quiet. "Stop, Foggy, stop. It's just Karen. You gotta calm down."

Yeah, that wasn't on the menu right now. He whined aloud, head rolling weak and limp from side-to-side. It looked like he was staring at something, eyes wide and petrified, but there wasn't anything in front of him but the wall of the bus. Karen tried again to brush her hand over his forehead—anything that would bring him back to her world instead of whatever one he was trapped in.

He shied from her touch, still trying to get away, chest heaving up and down as he started sobbing. The noises he made were soft, but that didn't mitigate how much they hurt. "No," he whimpered, shifting in her lap as if trying to move away from something. "No. Matt, no."

"It's Karen," she breathed again. "Foggy, it's just Karen. It's okay." The lie was starting to leave an awful taste in her mouth. The more she repeated it, the worse it got. "It's not real. It's not Matt, it's Karen."

"Please don't, Matt," he cried. "Matt, please."

Karen shook her head. What was he seeing? Was it anything like what she saw in her own mind? A monster, panting and snarling, born of blood and fire? Or a broken, terrified man, darting off into the darkness because it was the only place he could feel safe?

Foggy's voice dropped in volume, low and lost and so, so afraid. "Don't leave. Please don't leave me." His hand dragged itself over the floor, through the crusted blood that Karen hadn't been able to mop up. "Matt," he whispered, and then he started repeating it, over and over and over, and it got harder to hear every time.

Matt never came.

"It's not real," Karen kept telling him, leaning in as close as she dared, rubbing his shoulder with one hand and holding him in place with the other. The bandages she'd wrapped around what remained of his leg were already stained red. They weren't dripping, though, and that was something. "Foggy, it's Karen. I'm here. I'm right here."

"Matt," he whined, somehow getting himself half-twisted with his face in her knee. "Matty."

"No, it's Karen," she said, trying to keep patience in her voice. "I'm not Matt. Matt isn't here."

The fingers of his right hand were all twisted up in the fabric of his pants, pulling at the useless bit leftover after she'd cut the rest off. It bunched and cinched up in his hand. "Matt, it hurts."

"I know. Shh, shh." She leaned over to untangle his fingers from the fabric, but he held on.

"I c—I can't—can't—" his words were interrupted by heavy, shuddering sobs and too-short gasps for new air, "—can't feel... feel..."

Karen shook her head, chewing harder on her lip. She reveled in the pain, so slight and personal, not a carryover from the shattered thing on the floor in front of her. "Just stay still. It's gonna be okay."

Foggy just tossed his head, slow and weak. No, he was shaking it, his tongue flicking out to wet his chapped lips. "I can't feel. Feel—feel it. Matt, I can't... can't... Matt..." he was taking in sharp, random breaths, and letting them out even harder. They overtook his speech and he pushed his face harder into her knee, and then the sobbing returned and forced his coherence away.

"Shh-shh-shh. It's gonna be okay. Just rest." She was glad that Matt wasn't here, to tell her how badly she was lying.

It took ages and ages of her hushing his choking, struggling sobs, but he finally did start to relax a little, either from exhaustion or whatever ketamine was still in his system. Karen felt herself relaxing right alongside him, blowing out long breaths, praying so fervently in her head for him to be okay that she couldn't even pick apart a single coherent word in the mess. She stroked her thumb along the side of his face, pushed the tears off of his cheeks. He was so pale and warm.

Foggy fell asleep like that, breathing shallowly and twitching occasionally with the last dregs of the sobs that were still lingering in his chest. Karen kept whispering to him, brushed her fingers over his hair, along his neck. His pulse was rapid and thready.

Her legs had long fallen asleep, but she didn't care. The rain drummed endlessly above her, white noise for a ruined world. She kept moving her hand from his forehead to her own, comparing the two, trying to figure out how bad his fever was. His skin was flushed and damp, eyes glazed. He needed to take the antibiotics and the painkillers, she knew that, and she fumbled the bottles as she poured some of the pills out into her hand.

She grabbed one of the bottles of water and edged back over to him. "Foggy," she said, rubbing a thumb along his shoulder, looking hard to see if he was going to wake up and come out of it. She wished he would and she hoped he didn't.

He moaned faintly in the back of his throat; his eyes rolled around underneath their lids, opened slowly, and his gaze was dull and fixed on the bus wall. He didn't say anything. She couldn't even tell if he was fully conscious or not, and curled the pills into her fingers so she could rub at his jaw with her thumb.

"Foggy."

"Fuck off." The words were slurred, shoved up against each other so it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. "'M not buying."

She shook her head, not sure what the hell he was talking about. "Buying what?"

He didn't answer. His half-open eyes rolled around lazily, like he was tracking some poorly-built, invisible paper plane. One of his hands was twisting its fingers in his pants again. He started breathing a bit harder and she could hear the soft groan trying to feed itself underneath it.

"It hurts," he mumbled, and he couldn't have sounded more like Matt if he'd tried.

"Yeah, I know." She tapped his chin. "I need you to take these pills, Foggy."

A low rattling noise came out of his throat, and his voice was half-slurred, fractured and uneven. "Not payin' that much."

Karen shook her head, setting the pills aside so she could grab his head with both hands. His skin was hot and dry. "Foggy, it's Karen. Can you hear me?" He was staring off into some middle distance past her shoulder, eyes blank and unfocused. She patted his cheek, trying to get his attention, to get him to snap out of it. "Foggy."

"Matt, tell 'em," he grumbled, not looking at her, or anything really. It was terrifying. It was even more terrifying when he stopped talking altogether, falling into silence with eyes roving around aimlessly. Karen didn't even know what he was seeing, or thinking, but she could feel how warm he was through his clothing, and he wasn't getting any better despite the fact that she'd removed the source of infection with a fucking hacksaw.

Her heart was beating so fast that it almost felt like one long uninterrupted pulse, flooding her head with uncomfortable warmth and drawing the heat from her limbs until her fingers and toes felt frozen solid. He was going to die. Right here, right in front of her, despite what she'd done in the last three hours, the last three days.

Karen swallowed and it felt like there was something dry and solid stuck just behind her tongue. It tasted awful. She picked up the bottle of water again, shifting Foggy's head in her lap.

"Foggy," she said, "I need you to try to drink."

He tried to say something that started with the letter 'N' but wouldn't finish itself, trying to wiggle away from her again. She hissed and lifted his head, trying to get the water to his lips, but he resisted, pushing himself back on the leg he had left, turning his face away and shoving out with weak, shivering hands.

"No, no, no no no, you need to dr—"

"Fuck off!"

"Foggy—"

A soft whine came from him as she brought the water bottle back around again, and he tried to push her arm away, but there was no strength in him at all. Karen maneuvered her arm closer without much effort, and she lifted his head again, not wanting him to choke. She pressed the rim of the bottle up against his lips, chewing her tongue, expecting him to lash out again.

But he blinked a few times, seemed to realize what was being offered, and—fucking finally—drank. A palpable feeling of relief hit her, so strong that it made her dizzy.

"Good, good, that's great," she soothed, getting him to swallow a few more mouthfuls. Karen blew out a breath and went back for the pills again. "Can you swallow these, too?"

God, she knew it was too much to ask, too big a favor to pull from whatever stupid higher power was fucking with them that day, because he thrashed when she tried to put them in his mouth, yelling incoherently, swiping at her arms. Karen had to fumble not to drop the water and everything else right on his chest. What the fuck was she supposed to do? Why couldn't she have paid more fucking attention to him?

Karen chewed on her lip, staring at the pills, then the water, then Foggy in turn.

She thought for a few more seconds, and then took a few sips from the bottle, leaving a half-cup or so sloshing at the bottom. Gathering up the antibiotic capsules, she started twisting them open, dumping the powder inside into the bottle. She grabbed the empty Ziploc bag and spread it out on the floor, then took several Tylenol and tramadol and crushed them with the handle of her knife. Foggy turned his head half-toward the sound, but didn't respond otherwise.

Karen folded the plastic bag carefully and dumped the crushed tablets inside the bottle, too. Twisting the cap shut, she shook the whole mess together, frowning at the soupy mixture she'd created, cloudy white and gritty-looking as all hell.

"At least you aren't Matt," she breathed, mostly to herself, as she stared at it. "He'd throw this up in two seconds."

Foggy's tongue slurred clumsily around a bunch of words that she couldn't discern. It might not have even been English. What was that other language he knew? Portuguese? God, like it fucking mattered.

She brought the bottle back to his mouth. "I've got more water, Foggy, can you drink it?"

"Ngh," he said, but he let his tongue dart out along the bottle, and she tipped it forward slowly, easing a couple sips of the chunky swirl of water and medication into his mouth.

The second it touched his tongue, he was retching, and she had to shift him again as he immediately vomited up everything she'd managed to get in all over the floor of the bus. Karen let out a sound and she wasn't sure what it was or where it came from, but she knew it was angry. She went to set the mixture aside but Foggy knocked it right out of her hand with a pained grunt, yelling something about 'Matt' and 'bleach'.

Karen could only watch with a detached, empty acceptance as the bottle bounced around and spilled its contents all over the fucking floor.

Well.

\---

She spent the next two hours trying to get more water into him, with mixed results. It was fucking pointless—he fought her every move, cried and hollered in delirium, and eventually, slowly, fell into an awful, twitchy sleep that she knew would be his last.

God, she'd tried. She'd tried so fucking hard. But she was too late, as always. She just wasn't good enough, and she never would be. Not for him. Not even for herself.

She stared out of the bus' emergency exit, fiddling with the whistle under her shirt. She thought about it so many times, putting it to her lips and blowing into it, but a weak surge of fear and adrenaline always hit her as soon as she grabbed it, and she couldn't follow through.

What a fucking surprise.

Karen sat against the bus wall and watched Foggy breathe, shallow and rapid, on the floor. She wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn't come. She felt like Paige again, and she had a strange hybrid of anger and gratefulness stirring in her chest at the feeling. Anger, because she didn't want to go back to that, she didn't want to live that life ever again. Gratefulness, because she _knew_ that she was feeling anger, she could identify it, trace it back to its source.

Another ten minutes passed. It was going to get dark soon. She knew Foggy wouldn't last to see whatever damp and formless morning would be waiting for them, and she found that she didn't want to see it, either.

Her fingers stroked the whistle under her shirt, up and down, up and down. Foggy was still breathing. She matched the movements of her hand to his inward and outward breaths. Waiting. Letting her eyes rove from his face to his chest to his leg—what was left of the leg—and then back again. Wondering how many cycles she would be able to make before he stopped taking in air.

A noise caught her attention, jerking her out of her thoughts and her trance-like loop of eye movement. It was a gargled snarl, and faint, incomprehensible vocalizations. A feral. No, she could hear two distinct voices. Karen sat halfway up, trying to listen harder. She wasn't sure what she was listening for until one of the voices barked a short, garbled word, the tone and cadence lighting familiarity through her thoughts, and then she knew.

Karen scrambled to her feet, stepping around Foggy so she could slip down the length of the bus. Her head was nagging at her, telling her not to leave him there, telling her that she was defenseless, that she didn't have a gun, but she climbed out into the street anyway. In the alley, she paused, listening for the dull echoes all around her before following their lead down the street to her left. Tiny puddles of water splashed under her feet and the rain was a fine mist all around her but she plunged into it anyway, wanting to call out, blow the whistle, do something, say anything.

She was breathing hard by the time she passed the next block, and the noises were getting closer and closer. _You're being so stupid_ , her mind yelled, and it sounded like Paige, and she wanted to strangle it out of herself. It wouldn't be the first stupid thing she'd ever done and it couldn't be her last, either. She would make fucking sure that it wasn't her last.

The wind twisted and spat rain against the back of her neck as she turned a corner and saw them, grappling and snapping at each other in the middle of the street, two animals dancing in a grey mist. One of them was smaller than the other, clearly at a disadvantage, clutching at one arm as it stumbled and fought to stay on its feet. The other was taller and far more broad. Gurgling out a wet, sick sound, it grabbed the smaller one and threw it hard to the ground, where it yelped and scrabbled for purchase against the cracked concrete, where the dust had turned to mud and was inexorably filling all the empty corners of the world.

Her mind sang, and tried to pull her back to the shelter, to the Park, to Eric and his ruined voice, but she dug her heels in and stayed where she was. Not now. Never again. She'd die first.

A booming snarl came from the big one and the smaller one curled halfway up as if to ward off any other violence, which didn't work, because the big one just roared and started ripping into it, biting and kicking and scratching. Karen had never seen one go after another so violently. She knew why.

This wasn't a territory squabble at all—this was vengeance, because the one on the ground had wiped out an _entire fucking pack_ in the subway tunnel, and the other one must have been a straggler, a survivor. Now it was out for blood, and it was definitely succeeding.

Karen stepped forward, even though her insides were quaking, as the big one kept scratching and biting, rattling noises bubbling up out of its chest. They echoed through the shells of the buildings around them and drifted weakly back into the street. She swallowed and kept walking, reaching behind her to wrap her fingers around the knife.

It didn't take long for the big one to catch sight of her, and she wasn't sure if that had been her intention to start with, but it happened anyway. Snarling, it turned its face in her direction, mouth dripping with blood and drool. Female. Blood travelled, lethargic, through the furrows of wrinkles across her leathery face. Her expression twisted and contorted around her yellowed snarl, and her hair was an unkempt grey wildfire spreading in all directions. She coughed out a strange noise and then lunged, leaning heavily to the left.

Karen felt herself trying to freeze up, felt that strange tingling in her limbs and face as she clutched the knife's handle. It felt so heavy in her hand, but her heart was so light, fluttering airily at the back of her seizing throat.

Why was she here? Why had she followed the sounds? She was such a fucking idiot.

From the ground, the other feral got his unsteady feet under him, spitting blood out of his mouth and clutching at his right shoulder. His breaths came in and out of him with inconsistent, whistling jerks of his chest, turning his own growl into a broken little noise, a weak echo only. He staggered, barking out another sound that Karen couldn't translate, and swung out at the back of the female's head, trying to catch a handful of her hair with his left hand.

She spat and whirled, swinging out with her elbow. Normally, he might have been able to feel it coming, lean away or duck in that eerie way he did, but not this time. There was an audible cracking sound as the female clocked him hard in the jaw, and then he was down on the ground again, making awful noises as he clawed at the muddy asphalt and tried to suck air into his malfunctioning body.

The female was on top of him again, clawing at his chest, snapping for his face. Her hands, gnarled and twisted, locked themselves around his neck, her stained and splintered fingernails digging in, thumbs crushing themselves against his throat. She was barking and howling as he scrabbled uselessly at her arms, and she loosed that wail of victory like down in the tunnels, slamming his head into the asphalt.

She was going to kill him. She was going to kill Matt.

Without thinking, without even considering the consequences, Karen crossed the ten or eleven steps that lay between her and them, and sank the knife into the female's back, just to the left of her spine, all the way to the hilt. The feral made a noise, a poor cross between a baby's cry and a wounded dog, and then tried to fight back upright, clawing at her own shoulder as she tried to reach what had been stuck into her.

Karen backpedaled as the female turned halfway toward her and then collapsed, vomiting out a low whimper and a whole lot of blood. The rain hissed all around them as Karen stared, waiting for the feral's hand to stop shaking. It seemed to take forever. She could hear Matt struggling for air on the ground in front of her, making soft sounds that she might have mistaken for the rain if she wasn't so familiar with him.

Blood bubbled out of the feral's mouth and nose, swirling amongst the dark pools of rain, and it finally took a final half-gasp before going still. Karen didn't wait another second, stepping around the body and toward Matt, who was at least getting his hands underneath him, and she pushed out a sharp breath before opening her mouth.

"Matt—"

"N— _n—"_ he couldn't get the word out, and flinched away from her with a soft whine, fingers scrabbling at the ground as he forced himself upright with a heavy, groaning effort. There was blood on the back of his head, trailing down his neck, dull red lines running side-by-side with the fetid rain. She couldn't see anything else because he was turning his face away from her, just like in the tunnel, just like all the other times before this when he was afraid of her. It took a horribly long moment for him to get to his feet, and then he was only trying to get away.

Karen managed to stop herself from lunging after him by clenching her fists, tight enough that her fingernails started cutting into her palms. He staggered awkwardly and crashed into the wall of the nearest building, next to a yawning alley. Breathless whimpers tried to come out of his throat as he leaned hard against the worn bricks, gasping. Even from this distance, she could see how pale his skin was.

"Matt," she breathed, but didn't step forward. He'd flee again, just like in the tunnel, and he wouldn't return. The rain roared in all directions. She spoke softly, not even knowing if she could be heard. "Please don't go."

He hovered at the wall, lowering his head. His chest was shuddering as he tried to breathe normally. "Karen," he mumbled, and once again, her name was two words instead of one, but it was his voice, it wasn't the rain or the wind, she knew that. Hearing it sent the relief pooling in her chest, warm and soft. His right arm was moving slowly, carefully—that had to be where she'd stabbed him. It wasn't in the chest. A survivable wound.

She could hear the relief in her voice when she spoke. "Matt," she said again, like having his name in her mouth would make it permanent, make it so she'd never have to watch him run away from her again. " _Please_."

He shifted a bit on his feet, but didn't run. The rain snaked down his face, along his neck, but he didn't try to get it off, either oblivious or uncaring of the damage it would do to his skin. He opened his mouth and spoke while still looking away, picking out the words with a slow, cautious hesitance. "...I am... sorry. I am not... safe."

She shook her head and finally took a step forward. "Come here, let me—"

Matt jolted with a faint whine, shying away from her, and started moving down the nearby alley, likely to return to whatever dark corners he'd been hiding within—but he didn't _belong_ there. He never would.

She didn't give chase. She knew better, and called out to him instead. "Wait! Matt, wait, please don't run!"

He slowed considerably, but didn't stop until there was something he could put between him and her—a wrecked taxi, jackknifed into the wall. When she started moving closer, with slow and wary steps, he huddled a little behind it, shivering. "Karen," he said, then said something she couldn't figure out, then, "not. Please."

"I won't hurt you," she said— _his_ words, the ones he'd mumbled to her so many times, and she could see his face twisting behind the thin veils of rain when he heard it. She moved carefully down the alley, closer to the taxi. "I didn't mean to, Matt. I didn't mean to hurt you."

A low huff came from him. There was no growl, no anger to be found in it. "Had to."

"No, I didn't have to. _I didn't_ have to do that to you, Matt, that was a mistake."

"I am not safe."

"Stop saying that. It isn't true."

Matt's eyebrows crumpled as he paused to figure it out, this new piece of information that he couldn't wrap his head around. It was nearly as painful to look at as Foggy's leg had been. He sniffed once, but didn't move any closer. His left hand was fiddling shakily with the hem of the jacket.

She spoke gently, as carefully as she could. "It's okay, Matt. Please don't run. Okay? Foggy..." she paused to take in a breath, and steel herself, "...he's hurt. He needs you."

Matt's expression turned to agony, but he didn't budge. "Does not need."

"He _does_. We both do. Can't you tell I'm not lying?"

He sniffed again, tried to shake his head. It twitched instead. "...I..." his eyes were staring at the ground, "...I am not... not safe. Foggy s... says this." A low huff blew some of the rain off of his face. "I kill," he breathed, and he rubbed at his hands, both of them, and even in the dark shadows of the rain she could see the blood still trapped under his fingernails. The tape that Foggy had placed on his broken finger was long gone.

"You did it to save him. That's what you did, Matt, in the tunnels. That's what you did. You saved him."

Matt lifted his head, just slightly. "Scare you." He gestured to his right arm. "You hurt. Had to hurt." His head lowered again, and he took a step backwards, as if anticipating another swing of a knife.

"I didn't mean to, Matt. I didn't mean to hurt you."

His voice was so soft and faint, she would never be sure if she'd heard it or not. "Had to." But he sniffed again, tried to shake his head again. He was shaking so hard. His voice was stronger when he said, "I am sorry, Karen. I am sorry."

She crept forward, an inch at a time. He didn't back away. "It's okay, Matt. It's okay. Please, please don't run. Foggy needs you back." She swallowed hard; it felt like the whole world was caught up in her throat. "... _I_ need you back."

He tilted his head slightly, listening. To her words or her heart, she couldn't tell. He spoke again, so hesitant, and his voice was sharp with fear and a buried sob that just wouldn't come out. "...I want to..." he closed his mouth and his jaw jumped; he licked his lips and winced before continuing, "...I want to. Come home. I want to come home." His voice got stronger; the sob did, too. "Karen. I want to come home. I want to come home."

"You can come home, Matt."

The sob tore out of him. It sounded like a million fragile things splintering and shattering all at once. He kept his face turned away from her still, trying to hide what she'd already seen too much of. "Can't," was all he managed to eke out past his throat.

Karen shook her head. "Why?"

His head was bowed. The rain dripped off of his hair. "Me." An obvious answer. Because there had to be some reason for why she'd hurt him the way she had. Because it couldn't have been a mistake, no, mistakes were things reserved only for broken people like himself. "I am... I am not safe."

Karen slowly made her way around the tail end of the taxi. Matt didn't bolt, but he did shift on his feet. The closer she got, the more injustices she could see. His clothes were soaked through. The bruise on his face was still there, still healing beneath the gash across his cheek, untreated, the stitches long gone. All of it seemed like a lifetime ago. There were new bruises, now, purpling his other eye. Scrapes on his neck. Reddened patches from being trapped in the rain.

When she got within a few feet of him, he took a step back, his breaths quickening erratically. "Karen, _no_. I am not safe."

She shook her head. "I know you're not. I don't give a shit, okay? Come on, Matt."

He huffed, took another step back. "...Not safe," he repeated, weakly.

Karen kept approaching, and he finally let her in. Into his personal space, until she could touch him and make sure he was real. Her fingers landed on his chest and he flinched but didn't run away. His clothes were damp and he was shivering so hard. Eyes red and wetter than the world around them.

"It's okay, Matt," she breathed, trying to soothe him, keeping her hand on his chest. The other she ghosted down his arm to gently grasp the wrist of his shuddering hand—the unhurt one—to pull him closer. "It's okay. It's okay."

His head twitched in a shake; his expression crumpled. He turned his face to hide it from her again, trying to pull back out of her grasp. It was weak attempt and he went nowhere.

"You're home," she whispered, and he made that sharp and splintered sound in his throat. "It's okay. You're home." Karen tugged a bit harder and he finally broke, finally snapped the invisible wire that was holding them apart, and he crashed into her like a lost ship on a distant shore, wrapping his good arm around her back, pulling her close against him, burying his face in her neck. He was so cold. She brought her arms around and held him, just held him, as gently as she could, while he twisted the fingers of his shaking hand into her jacket.

"Karen," he whimpered, disjointed, letting out a sharp sob. She'd never heard those noises from him before; his crying had always been silent. There wasn't a sound in the world she wanted to hear less. "Karen. Karen."

"It's okay," she whispered, feeling him shaking from the cold, shaking from the tremor, shaking from the sobs that were coming unstoppable from his chest. She strangled her reflex to pull away from the tremor; instead she set it alight and left it to burn alive in the back of her head, where it fucking belonged. "It's okay, Matt, it's okay. Everything's going to be okay."

"Home," he cried, into her neck. "Home, Karen, home home."

"I'm taking you home. Okay? I'm going to take you home."

The icy cold of his skin was interrupted by the warmth coming from his eyes, and she clutched him just a little tighter, running a hand along his shoulder. His jacket was coming apart in her hands, evidence of how long he'd been in the rain.

She rested one hand on the back of his neck, her fingers idly twisting into his choppy hair. A few strands came away on her hand—the rain again—and she sighed, pulling away from him as gently as she could, trying to get him moving.

"You need to be out of the rain, Matt," she said, and he made a low noise in response. Something affirmative, she thought. "Come on. Let's go back to Foggy. Okay?"

Matt turned his face away from her as soon as they separated. He rubbed at his darting eyes with the back of one hand, and up this close, she could see how swollen and red the gash on his face had become. God, he looked awful. His breathing was still labored, not as bad as it had been in the tunnel. Was he still wearing the bandage?

"This way," she breathed, reaching out to brush a hand down his arm. He jerked harshly away from her touch, as fleeting and light as it was, tightening his jaw around a frightened whine. Karen shook her head. "I won't hurt you, Matt."

He didn't say anything, just kept his head bowed, his jaw torqued up so tightly she could see the muscle quavering just beneath his skin. It didn't look like he was going to budge, but then he took an uneven breath and moved to follow her as she started down the alley, keeping an ocean of distance between them. He wasn't limping, at least, but his breathing, God. His face. The knife wound.

And he'd been alone with all of it. For days. Had he slept? Had he eaten? Did it even fucking matter?

Karen brought him down the alleyway, then down the street. The bus still sat where it had been for ages and would continue to be until it rusted into dust. She wanted to kick herself for leaving Foggy alone, but it wasn't like she could have picked him up and brought him with her.

Matt followed her instead of taking the lead, slinking along in her shadow, and as she shoved the bus door open, she turned and saw that his expression was already twisted and heavy. He could smell it, the blood, the infection. She knew he could. Probably from all the way out in the street. Now it was just thicker and harder to ignore.

"Up here," she said.

He climbed the steps carefully, silent, head tilted. Had he stopped crying at all since they'd started talking? There was no sobbing, just tears, and labored, shortened breaths.

"Foggy," he breathed, his whine an undercurrent, sharpening the word, turning it into a cry all its own. He slipped past her and went straight to the side of his friend—still unconscious, still pale—wincing once as he dropped down to the floor, dragging himself closer, reaching out with a shaking hand to touch the other man's chest.

Karen approached slowly. "Matt, I had to... his leg, it..."

Those sobs started up again, the audible ones, as he brushed his hand down Foggy's chest, head still tilted as if studying him. Matt saw more than any of them could. She wished she'd had his help yesterday. "Foggy," he whispered. His hand kept moving, his shoulders shaking, and his shivering fingers found that gap, the empty place where a limb should have been, and he shook his head, over and over, sharp twitches from side-to-side. As if he couldn't comprehend it, couldn't understand why there was so much missing.

"...I'm sorry, Matt," she said to him, moving over to Foggy's other side and sitting down.

All he could force out was the other man's name, and those awful sobs, and then he seemed to crumble all at once, a building torn of its supports, and his forehead came down and rested on Foggy's chest and he couldn't even babble anymore. He could only make those tortured noises, and she'd never heard them so loud and sharp before, never seen him in such pain.

Foggy didn't respond to any of it, pale and still and cold. Matt kept one hand on Foggy's chest, the other still tucked up against his injured ribs. He shifted, then dropped to the floor, and for a second she thought he might have passed out, but no, he was just curling up against Foggy's side, too hurt to move with any semblance of grace. Matt wiggled closer, and pressed his face against Foggy's neck, and still, no response. He shut his eyes, dragging in those hard, agonizing breaths, and stayed right where he was.

Karen sat and watched. There wasn't anything else she could do. She tried to creep forward, to touch Matt's shoulder, to comfort him, but he flinched away from her, fear on his face. It felt like he'd taken her knife and stuck it in her instead of the other way around. He even levered himself halfway up and retreated from Foggy's side, shuddering in pain and sorrow. It looked so wrong, like watching a pair of magnets being forced apart, something completely against the laws of nature.

Matt pushed himself back until he was leaning against the emergency exit, his temple rubbing against the glass, leaving behind streaks of grey-stained blood. He kept his injured arm at his side, against his ribs, the other hand clutching at his elbow, his shivering, weak grip forcing him to continually readjust its hold. Through all of it, he kept his head bowed, his face turned away.

"I'm not going to hurt you," she told him, unable to remember how many times he'd told her the same, recalling how she hadn't believed him at first, either. He clearly wasn't listening, so she stopped repeating it. "Will you let me see your arm?"

He shifted again, putting more space between him and her, so obviously that was a _Fuck no._ She tried to hide her sigh under her own tongue, but he must have sensed something about her reaction, because he turned his head and pushed his forehead against the wall of the bus. Jaw clenched, posture stiff. He was terrified.

There wasn't anything she could do for that, not right now. Karen reached down to check Foggy's pulse—rapid, thready. It didn't seem like anything could be as pale as Matt's skin, but there was Foggy, ghost-white, breathing shallowly, barely moving.

"Matt," she started, hesitantly, and tried not to sob at his startled jump, "I'm going to change his bandages, and then we need to get him out of here, okay?"

He frowned, then hummed softly. Not an answer.

She didn't know what the hell it was supposed to mean, so she just pushed a breath silently out of her nose and got moving anyway, sliding herself down to the useless stump she'd made out of the leg. The bandages were soaked through, now, and she removed them as gently as her shaking hands would allow.

Foggy made a whisper of a noise in the back of his throat, and then Matt was there, his mouth all twisted up underneath the scruff on his face as he brushed his shivering fingers over Foggy's forehead. Karen wasn't sure if Foggy even knew who was touching him, but seeing Matt there, finally where he belonged, filled her with that dizzying relief again, and she paused to take a breath before tossing aside the used bandages and gathering more up.

It was ugly, what she'd done to him. Sloppy. Her stitches were uneven and the whole thing was swelling up, reddened and far too warm to the touch. God, it looked awful. She wanted to puke.

Instead, she swallowed down the dampness in her throat and the lump of worry caught up behind her tongue and talked again, as softly as she could. Matt still jumped, twitched, bowed his head. She wasn't sure which of them were more painful to look at.

"Matt, can you tell if this is infected?"

There was a muscle jumping in his jaw as he gazed fixed at some point between her chest and the end of the earth. His head canted slightly to one side; he blinked slowly and spoke even slower. "Warm. This, not..." he huffed. Frustration fluttered across his face like a shadow passing overhead. "...Not a lot," he mumbled.

Her stomach twisted. She started wrapping the stump up with clean bandages. They were running low. She didn't know what she was supposed to do when they were gone. "I need to know if I removed it, Matt. Is his leg infected?" she asked, speaking and enunciating with great care, because he needed to understand.

His eyelids fluttered at the tone in her voice; the barest flash of irritation settled momentarily around his mouth before he forced it away with another huff. "Foggy is... is warm. Too... a lot... hn."

Karen shook her head, unable to understand what he was trying to say. She didn't want to snap, but she did anyway, and it hurt deep in her chest. "Matt! You need to tell me if the infection spread before I could cut it off, do you understand?!"

If his head were any more bowed, it'd be in the fucking ground, she thought. His eyes were damp, darting around in fear as he curled a little into himself. He seemed to chew on nothing but air for a long moment, looking for what to say, what to do. "Karen, it... not, it... ugh." A low whine settled in the back of his throat. "I do... don't—"

"Yes or fucking _no_ , Matt!"

He sobbed once, that horrible fucking splintered noise. "Y—yes. No. Yes. No. Karen." He sobbed again, and again, nearly hysterical, frustrated with himself, removing his hands from Foggy to scrub them hard over his face, whimpering. His breathing was ragged and painful. "I don't. I don't."

Karen blasted out a breath and he screwed his eyes tightly shut like her air was going to cross the space between them and strangle him to death. She was freaking him out, and he wasn't going to be able to talk at all soon, and it was all just going down the fucking shitter, and it was her fucking fault. The new bandage job looked like horseshit. Why the hell Foggy had kept her around for so long was a fucking mystery.

Fuck it all. They could figure it out later. "We need to get him out of here, Matt," she said, changing the subject. "We can't stay in here. We need to get to the truck before it gets dark." And that would be soon. Foggy wouldn't survive another night in this shithole. If he even survived at all.

Matt sniffed, tried to speak again. Nothing came out. His hands went back to his face and he hid behind his fingers, digging his fingernails into his skin.

She felt like she wasn't even in control anymore, just a witness, a disinterested viewer for the shittiest television show in the world. "Calm down," she heard herself snap, and God, she didn't even know who she was directing her words to.

They hit Matt, at least, and he huffed a few times, winced hard, tried to breathe around the agony in his chest. Finally, he said something, all his syllables isolated from themselves and half-muffled by his hands, his voice stumbling harder than she'd ever heard it do before. "K—Karen. I know. This, I know. I know. Know where."

"Where what?"

"T—tr—... truck. The truck. I know."

"You know where the truck is?"

Matt tried to nod but the virus caught the movement and corrupted it, turning it into a rough, worthless twitch. "Yes. I know this. Yes."

She let out a breath. "God, thank God. Where is it? Is it far from here?"

"No, not far." His right arm lowered itself and he hugged it against his side. "I know where. I know."

Karen was already gathering up all of their shit and tossing it into the medical bag. The used gauze, the syringe, all of her refuse she just threw aside. Every tiny noise she made seemed to make Matt flinch harder and harder. She grabbed the water, the candles, everything that could possibly be useful, stuffing it all into the duffel.

"We're going to have to leave Foggy here. Get up, come show me where the tr—"

To her shock, Matt interrupted her. It was such a rare occurrence that it gave her pause as he spoke in awkward, halting syllables. "No. Won't leave Foggy. No."

"There's no other way, Matt. We'll be back as fast as we—"

"No!"

Karen made a noise, a low grumbling thing that she knew she'd fucking picked up off of him. "You have to. It'll be okay. We can find something to lock the bus. We'll come back for him."

Matt wasn't budging, somehow both standing his ground and quaking in fear. "Not. Will not." His chin lifted marginally. Funny, how he wouldn't stand up for himself, but would tear himself to pieces for his friend. "I stay."

"You can't show me where it is if you don't come with," she said, again slowing her speech down to make sure it was reaching his scattered head. "Matt, don't do this."

His chin lifted a little more. "No."

God, they did not have time for this stupid argument. Her anger reached her words, turned them bitter in her mouth. "Matt, it—this is stupid. Get up. Let's—"

"I carry."

Was he being fucking serious? "Matt, no."

"Foggy. I c— I can. Carry him."

"Bullshit. You can barely fucking walk."

He lowered his head slightly, working his jaw. "I won't... I will not... leave him." Even in his fearful expression, she could see that hard, stubborn edge that the virus couldn't remove from him.

"We're coming back. I told you. Take me to the truck, and I'll drive it back here," she said, feeling like she was repeating herself. Matt was not stupid. He'd understood it the first time, she knew that. "Unless you can give me exact directions."

"Karen, _please_ ," he mumbled softly.

She sighed, impatient, and frowned as he flinched and lowered his head again. Karen chewed on her tongue. He wasn't going to change his mind, and they were running out of time.

All right. Yeah. She could do this. "Okay," she said. "Fine, Matt. You want to carry him? On your back?"

His chin lifted slightly again. "Yes."

"You're going to kill yourself if you do this, do you know that?"

For the first time since she'd found him, he lifted his eyes, tried to center them on her face. His chest shuddered for air. "Foggy, more. More... more important."

Fucking idiot. "Your ribs. Your arm."

Matt looked like he wanted to shake his head, but it just twitched twice, unevenly. There was something dark and heavy in his empty gaze. He'd made up his mind. There wasn't any changing it now. "I am okay. Please. I want take. Take Foggy." He shifted on his knees. "Karen. Please."

She stared at him, and he stared blankly back. The moment stretched between them, trapped them together, a frozen shard of time that she didn't want to end. Then she cleared her throat, and got to her feet. "Fine. You want me to help get him on your back?"

An emotion that she couldn't recognize flitted across his face. "Yes."

"All right. Come on."

It was awkward and Foggy made a lot of pained noises when she lifted him up. His skin was so warm. Matt took his weight like it was nothing, carefully adjusting Foggy's knees at his hips as he straightened up. The atrophied muscles of his left leg shivered from the strain. He didn't seem to notice.

"You see? I car—can carry," he muttered, lips twitching like he wanted to smile. "Need go."

"We don't have a gun."

He paused for a second, tilting his head, listening. "Is safe. Need go."

Karen frowned at him. She felt like she'd just watched someone take a fatal dosage of pills, now waiting for death to claim them. Matt had the gun in his hand, the barrel to himself, and he was pulling the trigger.

Her complete lack of surprise burned like fucking hellfire.

"All right. Come on, Matt."

\---

Karen groaned to herself when they walked a simple five or six blocks, turned a corner, and saw it sitting right there. Stained with rain and mud, a dent bashed into the side of it, still up against the power pole. Their fucking truck. The dead alien was still curled up in the goddamn tailbed.

Foggy never woke up. Matt's steps were listing to the left since they'd started moving, and he stumbled a lot, but he didn't slow, and he didn't stop. She could hear his breathing getting worse and worse, and the low, involuntary sounds of pain coming louder and louder from his chest. Every time she approached as if to help, he flinched away, staggered, whined. She wondered if he'd ever let her touch him again.

Something told her that the next time she'd be able to, it'd only be so she could lower his fucking corpse into the ground. Would he want a funeral? Did he even know what a funeral was?

She'd had quite enough of them, she thought. Especially the one that had being going for the last two years, their world burning in a blinding pyre, unmourned, an effigy to itself and all the things they would never have again.

Matt slowed to a stop at the cab of the truck, swaying hard but catching himself before he fell. He blinked rapidly and kept pulling in choppy breaths, grunting softly as he backed away so she could get the cab door open.

They laid Foggy down in the backseat, and the moment that Matt pulled his hands to himself and moved back out of the cab, he made a soft sound and collapsed against the doorframe. Karen jolted, reaching out immediately to help him, her heart pounding, knowing he was probably dead.

No. Matt would never be that lucky. He jumped slightly when she touched him—her surprise that he'd let her do it at all made her pause—then turned his face half-toward her. "Karen, not."

"You okay?"

"...No." What an obvious answer. God, he hadn't been 'okay' since the thunderstorm. Or whatever kind of storm that world-shattering calamity had been. His shaking fingers found the doorframe, inched up to the inside joint of the door, curled themselves weakly around it. He tried to pick himself up and couldn't.

Karen sighed, tossing the duffel bag onto the front seat and ignoring his twitching, whining protests as she hooked her hands under his armpits and hauled him up into the truck. He barely weighed anything and couldn't even fight her off. His left hand cast around, got a hold of the driver's side headrest, but his grip faltered like it always did, and he would have tumbled straight to the floor—and landed right on his goddamn ribs—if she hadn't reached out and snatched his arm first.

Matt twisted as well as he could, which was not at all, forcing out a weak, hissing growl as he pawed at her hand. "N-not."

She swallowed and eased him to the floor. "Easy. I said I wouldn't hurt you."

He squeezed himself between Foggy and the back of the passenger seat, silent.

Karen frowned, wanting nothing more than to squeeze herself right in next to him, to comfort him, but she knew the tremor would terrify her and his terror of her would make it a million times worse. With more clumsiness than she wanted to admit, she patted the seat next to him. "Just rest. I'm gonna get the tires unstuck."

Matt didn't answer. He leaned carefully forward and rested his chin on Foggy's shoulder, resting his shaking arm on the other man's chest, his thumb finding and idly fiddling with a loose thread on Foggy's sweater. Well, if he died there, at least he wouldn't die alone.

She stepped back out into the rain, ignoring the way her skin burned as she opened the tailgate and climbed into the bed, looking for the rifle Foggy had dropped. It wasn't there. Karen poked around, looked under the alien, next to it, searched the immediate vicinity of the street, but it was gone. Great.

Karen climbed into the driver's seat, casting a quick glance behind her—no change. Matt's hand was still fiddling, so he was still alive and conscious, although if there was anyone could fucking fidget with any and all things in their sleep, it'd be Matt. She twisted the keys in the ignition and the truck's engine flared obediently to life.

The engine wailed as she pressed the accelerator, the truck's frame jerking as it tried to move forward. It hit the mud again, tires spinning without traction, and she took her foot off the gas. She sighed and rubbed her face, then peered out the window, ignoring Matt's weak gasping breaths.

An empty street, but the building Matt had snuck them into—a bakery or something—had boarded windows. She climbed out of the truck and shoved a few pieces of the particleboard out of one of the bakery's windowframes, wincing at the sound as they clattered to the dirty sidewalk. They were heavy, and clunky, but she still managed to drag them over and jam them in front of the truck's back tires.

Karen climbed back inside the truck, checked on the other two again. The same.

Gingerly, she pressed on the gas pedal, chewing hard on her scabbed lip as she heard the tires struggle for purchase. The truck rocked slightly and then jerked forward all at once as the tires crested the particleboard, crossed them, fishtailed once, and shot the truck back out into the street. The alien slid down and out of the bed, toppling into the mud.

She really wanted to cheer. She didn't.

All she did was sigh in relief, rub her face, and turned in the seat to face the back of the cab. Still the same. "Don't let him roll around, okay, Matt?"

She thought she heard a mumbled, "Yes," and tried to smile as she started off down the street, homeward bound.

\---

Matt was quiet for most of the ride, bracing Foggy's side with his other arm whenever they hit a bump, swallowing what had to be constant nausea from being in a moving vehicle. He didn't complain.

Karen tilted the rear-view so she could keep an eye on them, watching and waiting to see if Foggy's chest stopped rising and falling or Matt's tremor finally ceased. There was really only one way for him to be rid of it entirely, she knew that.

They were ten blocks out when Foggy's voice rose softly in her ears past the rhythmic swish-hiss of the windshield wipers.

"...Matt?"

She turned her head and jerked her eyes so quickly to the rear-view that she was shocked to not have whiplash. Foggy was awake, eyes half-open, fever-glazed, and she couldn't tell if he was still delirious until a fractured little smile crossed his lips. He reached out with one hand and Matt took it with both of his own, despite the pain, clutching it tightly as if Foggy would drop to the center of the earth if he let go.

"Matty. Matty," he breathed, trying to shift closer. "You came back."

Karen heard Matt sniff and mumble some more, but she couldn't hear the words over the truck's engine. She was so focused on staring at them that she nearly plowed into a goddamn streetlight, and hissed as she corrected her steering.

Foggy murmured something, and then she heard them both sniffling, and she looked over, and Matt was pressing his face hard into Foggy's and Foggy was doing the same thing, but it lasted only a fraction of a moment before Foggy just grabbed Matt by his shoulders with one clumsy arm and yanked him in tight. And Matt didn't try to get away, didn't twitch with panic, just melted into him, sobbing high and sharp and burrowing his face in Foggy's neck. She knew that only Matt would cry without sound, but right now she could hear them both, the shuddering sobs that each rocked the other in turn alongside the movement of the truck climbing over the city's cadaver.

Matt was mumbling, babbling, "Fog, Fog, Fog, Foggy, Fog, Foggy—"

"Matt, Matt, it's okay, oh my God, it's okay—I thought—I thought—"

"FogFog _FogFogFog—_ "

"You're such a fucking idiot, Matt, you're a fucking _idiot—_ "

Their speech melded into a messy mixture of Matt's sobbing and Foggy's heavy gasps of breath and _Fog, Matty, Fog, Matty_ that echoed like a heartbeat in the musty space of the truck's cab.

Karen stole another long glance, trying to memorize the image of them, so she could tuck it away and remember what home looked like. When her eyes flicked back to the road, it took so much effort, like they were encased in concrete, fixed in one position.

They kept talking, barely audible. Foggy's voice was so frail, and Matt's wasn't that far off, either. His wheezing had turned sharp and rapid. The sobs spilled out of him and they sounded like agony.

"Jesus Christ, Matt, Jesus, I thought you—you were gone, I—"

"Fog, Foggy. N-no, I come back, I come back, I come back."

"Let me see, man. Let me look at you."

"I come back. Foggy, I come back, you know, you know."

"All right. All right, buddy, come here."

Their words fell away to Matt's harsh breathing and Foggy's weakening sobs. The road hissed as the corpse of Brooklyn passed underneath the truck's tires. Soon. They'd be home soon. It was going to be okay. _They_ were going to be okay.

They had to be.

Foggy talked again, and he sounded even weaker. Half-awake. "Where'd you go, Matt? Where were you?" The fever was trying to drag him down again, and he was fighting it, God, he was fighting with everything inside him just to stay awake, to be there.

Matt spoke hesitantly, words that she'd already heard from him far too many times. "Foggy. Not safe. I am... am not," he mumbled, voice warping as his throat opened and closed around his words. "Not safe, Foggy."

Karen put it together, then. She should have figured it out days ago. Matt had heard every single thing that Foggy had said about him—that he was dangerous, and shouldn't be called back, and...

And everything else, too. The surgery. Foggy's screaming. The _sawing_.

He'd been too afraid to come back. Of her, she knew, and she hated herself for it, but it was clear that some of his fear was directed at himself as well, at what he'd done, at the beast that he'd become in that dusty subway tunnel when Foggy had broken his leg and all their lives into two.

"No, no, Matty, no, it's okay, it's..." Foggy's words were interrupted by a fresh batch of sobs, and she stole another glance; Matt's shivering hand was twisting a bit of Foggy's sweater between a too-weak thumb and forefinger, leaning hard against the backseat.

"I am sorry. To scare. You, Karen. Sorry, I am _sorry_."

"Don't you apologize," Foggy sobbed. He sounded half-strangled. "Don't you fucking apologize, Matt, you understand me? It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault."

Matt made those awful noises again, wails twisted up into the yelping of a wounded animal.

"I only wanted you back, Matt, I just... just..."

There were no answering words, not anymore. Matt was too far away already, ground down to silence by his thrashing, emotion-burned mind. She looked again and they were still in the same position, but Foggy's eyes were closing as Matt lost him to the pain, the fever and the infection.

Another long minute, and they were both quiet again, save for Matt's breathing, both of them tangled together, too hurt and exhausted to keep going. Matt probably hadn't slept. Karen couldn't even remember how many days they were in that bus. Too long for a man to go without sleep. Matt, especially.

She pressed a little harder on the gas pedal, gazing ahead as the road opened up before her, ushering them back home. Karen tried not to think too hard about what they'd do if the apartment was destroyed. Where they would go. Yonkers, surely, but not without Matt. Not even if he demanded to be left behind, like all the other times.

It took another half-hour, careful maneuvering through piles of debris, and there it stood.

She hadn't been expecting much. Definitely not for it to still be standing, but as they limped the truck back south through Brooklyn, she could see it. No smoke pouring out of it or aliens dancing around on the roof. Karen let her eyes search and search, trying to glean more information without getting distracted and driving off the damn road.

As they rounded the last street, she could see that the windows had been blown out—or busted open, and the ladder Karen had installed lay twisted in the street. The garage door was half-open and ripped diagonally off its hinges. Rain had pooled all over everything.

It didn't look like home anymore. It looked like a tomb.

Karen drove up to it anyway, sighing as she pulled alongside the garage and shifted the truck into park. Her voice was twisted and tear-stained.

"Welcome home, guys."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Really too late to call,_  
>  _So we wait for morning..._  
>  _To wake you is all we got._  
>  Band of Horses


	28. atlas

The apartment was a fucking mess. Karen managed to get the two of them up and onto the futon, at least. Matt had offered to carry Foggy again, but she'd helped instead, ignoring Foggy's faint protests as the both of them carted him up the stairs and placed him on the futon. The mattress was damp and cold from the rain sneaking inside the apartment, but that didn't stop Matt from curling up next to him, silent and shivering.

Burnt rubber and living silver had taken residence in the living room while they were gone; the scent of them bit at her nose and tongue so harshly it was like they were still there. Glass crunched under her feet as she moved across the stains of all of Matt's old wounds in the carpet to check on the windows.

His breathing was the only real noise besides the faint hiss of the rain outside, so much more noticeable now. Karen brushed a finger along one windowsill, knocking out the few remaining shards of glass that still sat in the frame, listening to their small, muffled sounds as they hit the street below. It was hard to figure out what had caused the windows to shatter. Could have been the wind, could have been an alien thrashing around. Judging by the smell, she was leaning toward the latter.

She straightened up, rubbing her pained face, then turned and descended the stairs to the garage to get the rest of their supplies out of the truck. It wasn't much. They'd left so much behind in that tunnel, and she wasn't sure if they'd ever get any of it back.

The duffel with the medical supplies and what she'd managed to scavenge she slung over her shoulder, and she wished it was heavier. The hacksaw was laying on the floor of the truck and Karen left it there, trying to ignore the memory lurking in her head, the phantom sensation of vibrations against her palms. It was so vibrant, the memory, forcing its way into the limelight of her thoughts, so clear that it was like she was still fucking doing it. She rubbed her palms hard on her jeans, trying to override the sensation. It didn't help.

Outside, the rain picked up, and the busted garage door shivered aloud as the wind hit it. Karen paused to try to shut it, but it was halfway off the track and all she managed to do was dislodge it further. New windows, a new garage door, Jesus.

There were so many broken things.

One step at a time, Karen thought to herself, and she blew out a breath and climbed back up to the kitchen. First of all, the purifier, the most important thing in the entire goddamned apartment. It was still sitting against the wall, and it looked to be undamaged. She opened the valve enough to dribble some of the water out onto her finger, tasting it. Her stomach didn't immediately rebel and empty itself all over the kitchen floor. Intact. Still working.

Thank God. Karen blew out a breath of relief, but it didn't do much for the twisted squirm that her insides had become. There were just too many other things to worry about. Second: the windows. It would be nighttime soon, and with the rain and the chill... the cold would probably kill Matt, and not just because of the injuries. He was a feral; he couldn't regulate his temperature like her and Foggy. She wasn't even sure how he'd survived for the days that he was gone.

It wasn't something she would have considered a few months ago, but there it was in her head, pushing the memory of the saw out of her focus: symptoms and side-effects of the virus that only Foggy had cared enough to look for. Who else would hear a feral trying and failing to talk and recognize that it was an actual disorder that came from brain damage, not some animal instinct to never speak again?

She carried the duffel bag into the living room and set it down on the coffee table—neither of them moved, and she paused to watch them for a few moments before slipping off into the storage room to dig around for something to seal the windows with. There were some threadbare blankets in a box, stained and ripped to hell. She'd kept them with the intent to cut them up and use them for rags. It was something.

There wasn't anything else in the storage room, unless she went about sewing their old clothes together. It mystified her how shitty Foggy was at sewing fabric when his stitches looked like they could be framed and hung in a freaking art museum. Karen's sucked. Even Matt would probably be able to do better—blindness, tremor and everything.

Karen crossed the living room and made way for the garage, pausing for a few seconds to check on them again. Curled into each other, Matt leeching off of Foggy's warmth, pushed in close and coiled up tightly, Foggy clinging to Matt's shirt, chin tucked over his head. She'd seen them in some confusing and baffling sleeping positions, but that one looked like extracting one from the other would be a physical impossibility.

That was her family, all of it, right there in front of her. Everything she had. Did she even deserve to call them that? After what she'd done to the both of them?

Either way, they were both sleeping, as well as they could in the cold, with their injuries. Matt's breathing hadn't changed at all; she could hear it through the entire apartment. It sounded like torture and she didn't know what she could do to make it easier for him.

She tried to stop thinking about it (what a fucking joke that was) and descended the stairs to the garage again. There were a few plastic boat tarps that she'd stowed away, intending to use them if they had to keep something dry in the truck's tailbed. A roll of black trash bags and a handful of gallon Ziploc baggies. Any port in a storm.

Back upstairs, and the two of them hadn't moved. Karen grabbed her box full of random rolls of tape, her coffee can of assorted screws and nails and her hammer, and went to work. She did a decent job of sealing the windows, she thought. Plastic underneath and the blankets on top of it, for insulation. It left the apartment dark and she had to turn on the old vinegar-bottle lamp and place it on the coffee table in order to see where she was even walking.

Karen thought about going down and working on the garage door, but she also thought about Matt or Foggy dying while she was fucking around with the useless thing, and that fear was what kept her in the living room. She paced for a while, unsure what to do. They'd been home awhile. Should she be waking them up? Making them take medication?

She decided to let them stay sleeping, because at least Foggy looked far more comfortable than he ever had in the bus, even on a damp mattress in an apartment that smelled like shit. Karen ended up grabbing the water lamp and taking it into the storage room so she could find a weapon—she ended up with the Smith & Wesson that Matt had dug out of the dust for her all that time ago. She'd gotten it working, and she even had a few rounds for it, even though it was impossible to tell if they were any good.

Still, she loaded it and kept it at hand. No way was she going to let some stray feral get in and hurt anyone. That was _her_ job, she thought, with a distant humor, wondering if it was a joke Foggy would appreciate. And if an alien came in, well. The pistol would be a far more painless way to die than by their goddamn claws.

She dug around for another blanket, a dry one. The one she found was thin and scraggly, but it was dry. Karen draped it over the both of them, and resisted the urge to tuck it around their bodies. No, she couldn't touch Matt, she couldn't scare him again. She'd put that terrified look on his face too many times.

It was starting to get dark— _darker_ , Jesus, it was hard to tell with the windows all covered up—and she was starting to worry. Well, more than usual. The heaviness in her guts had been there for days and days now; it was just getting heavier and heavier until she felt like gravity was trying to crush the breath out of her. And nothing was helping.

Foggy was _still_ asleep, unconscious, whatever, and Matt hadn't budged. Karen was watching, though, glancing over every few seconds to make sure that Foggy's chest was still moving, that Matt's hand was still shaking.

His breathing got her more than anything else, and after every occasional harsh exhale, she thought it would be his last, that he'd push out that rough, tiny breath from his broken body and never pull in the next one. Matt was nothing if not full of surprises, and he was giving her boatloads right now, as he doggedly hung onto life. She really should have known better. He was just as stubborn as she was.

The apartment was so dark and it felt so empty, like they'd hauled everything out of it; every noise seemed to echo and rattle around and it was so unfamiliar. She'd gotten too used to their pathetic, aimless life here. Coffee in the morning and Foggy's stupid jokes and Matt's constant little noises. Laughter, so much she could feel drunk on it.

Karen dropped her face into one hand and dragged it up into her hair, keeping the pistol in the other. Her mind played tag with itself, all looping thoughts and memories stuck on repeat. Sounds and smells, echoes and sensations.

It took her far too long to realize that the memories weren't awful. They weren't terrifying. They didn't make her want to die or run or seal herself off from the universe. They just kept replaying, a haze that didn't hurt like all the other memories but somehow hurt more than anything she could ever imagine. She didn't know what to do.

_You sound like someone stepped on a cat._

_Karen, thank you._

_The harder we pull, the faster we come back._

_Karen, you're welcome._

_You guys are nerds._

_I won't hurt you._

_Feel that? It's words, buddy._

_I won't hurt you._

_I think it needs to come off._

_I won't hurt you._

_Don't leave. Please don't leave me._

Karen tried to swallow the sob building up, but she choked on it, then coughed it out like hellfire so it could burn the air around her and yank tears into her eyes. She choked on the next one, and the next one, and she wanted to hide but she knew she couldn't, not even in the darkness where nobody could see her, where nobody would know she'd even existed at all.

She buried her face in her palm, felt the heat of tears on her skin, and wondered what horrible thing they must have done to deserve a person like her.

\---

Karen didn't even know how much time had passed with her useless and sobbing on the coffee table before Foggy made a low moan—pain—and she jolted and turned to the futon as if the sound had magnetically drawn her there. Foggy wasn't awake, and Matt was tucked up as tight as he could get against his side, eyes half-open, breaths ragged and shallow. His shivering hand was on Foggy's chest, but his fingers weren't fidgeting. It looked strange. She wasn't sure if he was conscious or not.

Karen tried to hover, to see if he might be getting ready to slip into the same fever-sleep Foggy had been hovering around for so long, but his face was pushed against Foggy's arm, and she couldn't see much of him. All of his visible skin was pale, and that wasn't a good thing. His tremor was incredibly pronounced, and as she stood and stared, he pulled that arm up against himself, stealing it away it between his body and Foggy's.

Yeah, he was awake. Hiding the frightening parts of himself from her, even now trying not to scare her. It didn't work, because his goddamn breathing was terrifying the living shit out of her instead.

Foggy made a noise again, and his face twisted up reflexively in pain even in his sleep. Matt wiggled a little closer, and even the slight adjustment in position seemed enough to wear him out.

Karen chewed on her bottom lip for a moment before speaking. "...Matt," she started, as gently as she could, but he still flinched like she'd reached out and struck him and he turned his face away, burrowing it against the damp mattress to keep it hidden. She sighed, started again. "Matt. I need to check Foggy over, okay? He needs to take some medication."

There was no answer, so she scratched her forehead, then pulled the duffel bag over, digging into the collection of medication. Karen didn't even know if she should still be giving Foggy the antibiotics. He hadn't been lucid enough to tell her much of anything after drawing that Godforsaken diagram. Hell, she didn't know if he'd ever be lucid again.

Still, she leaned across the space and shook him gently, running her palm up along his forehead. He was warm, but maybe not as warm as before. Karen touched her own forehead like back in the bus, trying to compare his temperature to hers, but it was fucking freezing in the apartment and she wasn't sure how accurate anything was going to be. "Foggy," she whispered, and shook him a little harder. Matt didn't budge and stayed silent. "Foggy. Can you hear me?"

He grumbled out something she couldn't understand, eyelids fluttering. His head rolled in her direction; his eyes rolled in the other. It seemed like a huge effort just for him to speak, and his voice was dry and cracking apart. "Huh?"

"Hey." She tried to hide the surprise in her voice. "It's Karen."

Foggy cast a hand in her direction and she snatched it out of the air like she was saving him from a fatal drop off of a cliff. His fingers were cold. He shifted and moved his other hand where it lay on the damp mattress. "Where am I?"

She spoke quietly, as if she'd hurt him if her voice was too loud. "Home. We're at the apartment." She swallowed. "Uh... what's left of it."

"Wh—?" That seemed to get his attention more than anything, and he blinked open his eyes all the way, squinting as he looked around to confirm it. "...It's... it's still here?" God, he sounded exhausted, and all he'd done was turn his head to look around. He let it lay on the damp mattress, blinking slowly. "My fucking leg hurts."

Karen rubbed her face again. Did he not remember the surgery? "Uh... well... do you remember what happened?"

His eyelids fluttered as he rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I remember."

She pushed out a silent sigh of relief, trying to hide it from him. Of course he remembered. It was impossible to not see the glaring and obvious gap of a missing goddamn limb. Looking at it made her insides churn and squirm around like pulsating, living creatures. "I think you should take some—"

"Matt." He was suddenly blinking his eyes the rest of the way open, trying to push himself upright with a groan of pain. "Where's Matt?"

Karen let the words die in her mouth and could feel the annoyed acceptance that was crossing her expression. She put her hands on Foggy's shoulders to stop him from moving. "He's right next to you."

Foggy struggled, turning his head and trying to lift himself up to see. He managed to get up on one arm, and Karen gave up on trying to keep him down and leaned over to help him up the rest of the way. They both ignored his pained groans—Karen because Matt needed to be looked at, and Foggy because nothing else really mattered.

"Matt," he whispered, and batted Karen's hands away to prove he could sit up on his own. He shifted a little and hid his pain behind a dark, stiff expression. "Buddy?"

Matt had his face in the mattress still, curled into as much of a ball as he could form out of himself with his injuries. He turned his head slightly in Foggy's direction, shivering and making those low, weak gasps for breath. Karen tried to ignore the feeling of her heart trying to batter its way through her ribs and out of her chest. Foggy was going to find out what she'd done. There was no way she could hide it, not that she wanted to.

She wondered where she could go when, inevitably, he figured it out and forced her away. Karen knew it was coming. Already, his angry voice and expression were in her head, and this time, she knew she deserved it. For lying and for hurting Matt in the first place. She didn't deserve to be with them after what she'd done. Maybe they still had space in Yonkers.

Foggy put one hand on the mattress and turned himself around while clutching at his bad leg with the other. He was so clumsy, and Karen could see the blood starting to collect in the gauze again as he shifted and flexed what was left of his leg. It made him jerk to a hard stop with a choked noise of pain, and that, more than anything else, was what got Matt to finally pick himself up off of the mattress.

He was trembling all over, his skin like paper, clutching at his right side like everything would spill out and leave him empty and useless if he didn't. Every breath sounded like it was a harder fight than the last one. It looked like he was dying. He probably was. He'd been dying since the tunnel. Karen wanted to throw up.

"Foggy," he mumbled, and his broken voice cracked halfway through the word.

"Yeah, buddy, it's me," Foggy said, and Karen couldn't tell whose pain he was wearing on his face as he leaned closer and reached out to steady Matt's shoulders.

Matt grabbed Foggy's left hand before it could touch his right shoulder—the injured one. His grip was awkward, fumbling, but he clenched his jaw and gently placed Foggy's hand down on the mattress. "Am... am... I _am_ okay," he said, the words just as slow and labored as his breathing. "You need. Ant... anti... b..." he gave up on trying to form the word, and pushed out a skipping sigh instead.

"Antibiotics," Karen finished for him, and tried to ignore how hard he flinched when she spoke. "Foggy, you need to ta—"

Foggy spoke over her, to Matt. He wasn't paying attention to anything else. "Your breathing. Buddy, your breathing. You can't— you can't—?" He sucked in a quiet little sob, and moved his hand to Matt's chest. Karen could see his fingers shaking, and his palm jumping where Matt was dragging in tiny, inconsistent amounts of air. "How long has it been like this?"

Matt stared at the mattress and didn't answer, so Foggy rounded on Karen, his eyes soaked, bloodshot. "How long has he sounded like that?"

"Uh." She couldn't come up with a worthwhile answer. Not one that wouldn't make Foggy even more worried. He had to be worried about _himself_ , not Matt. Eventually, she decided on the truth, because she didn't want to be called out on a lie. "Since the tunnel."

"Oh, God." Foggy rubbed his face and tried to scoot closer to Matt, but his leg impeded him, and he had to pause for a long minute to wait for the pain to fade. "Come here, Matty. Come closer," he said, tugging at his stained hoodie sleeve to guide him over.

Matt hesitated. His jaw worked as his eyes jumped around.

Foggy's voice dropped into something soft and soothing, a tone that Karen had only heard him summon for Matt. Nobody else. "You gotta let me look at you, okay? I need to..." he reached through the empty space between them again, but that time Matt shied away, tugging his sleeve out of Foggy's hand and pushing himself to the other side of the futon, out of reach. "Matt... damn it..."

"Foggy, you... mm." Matt bowed his head. "You. Anti... antibi... p-pill. You take." He chewed on his bottom lip and Karen saw the frustration weighing down his expression. God, it hurt. He'd gotten so far with his speech before the storm, but now it was like she was back with him in the shelter, the first time they'd met—re-met. She didn't know he could backslide so badly. Then again, so had she.

"I need to look, Matt. I need to check you over," Foggy said, a plea in his voice.

Matt was fiddling with his fingers. It took him a while to answer. "Foggy, you. Me after."

That made sense. Foggy was the most important thing in Matt's life. Matt would die for him, she knew that. Without a second's hesitation. Sitting there refusing treatment just so Foggy could be taken care of first, that was just a slower version of it. It was no shock to her. As always, the lack of surprise didn't stop it from hurting, from digging a sharp hot knife right under her sternum to churn with all the fear already swirling there.

But Foggy sighed, and relented, and swung himself clumsily toward Karen with a grunt of irritation and impatience that was aborted halfway out of his throat as his leg dragged against the mattress. He stiffened, going as still as he possibly could, wiry muscles looking like they were thrumming with pain. Tears gathered in his eyes. Karen could see him trying to breathe deep and slow, the exact opposite of Matt, but it didn't take long for him to start panting in agony, and then they sounded almost the same.

"You okay?" she asked, feeling as stupid and useless as she always did.

"No," he grunted through clenched teeth. It looked like he was going to attempt to say something else, but then he just shook his head and gestured at the duffel bag with one hand. The other was twisted up in the fabric of his pants.

Karen knew what he wanted.  She dug out the bag of pills, shaking the dosages out into her hand. The same ones he'd been taking in the bus, and the painkiller, too. They were running out of that one. She elected not to say anything about it. "Here." She took his hand and turned it over so she could place the pills in his palm, then stood up. "Let me get some water."

His voice was loud, awkward, as he blurted out through the pain, "P-purifier's okay?"

"...Yeah. It's about the only thing that is," she answered softly as she grabbed the jury-rigged vinegar bottle lamp and took it with her. In the dark, with only the refraction of light through water to guide her, everything looked far worse. The kitchen island was leaning, now, like something had tried to knock it over and only succeeded in tilting it to one side. She hadn't even noticed that. What else had she fucking missed?

It was going to take a very long time to repair it all. She gave in to this fact as she filled one of the big plastic cups with water and brought it back to the living room.

Matt had shifted even further away, probably to prevent Foggy from trying to help before he helped himself; now he was leaning against the wall with his legs curled up against his chest. He'd stopped chewing on his thumb, and was just resting his temple against the wall and fighting to breathe, eyes half-lidded, glazed. Foggy was glaring at the coffee table.

"Here," she said, holding the cup out as she sat back down, trying not to stare at Matt, trying not to think about what they'd do if he died right there on the futon. After a second she realized that she was _waiting_ for him to die right there on the futon, expecting it, preparing herself for it. She shook her head, trying to force the thought out.

Foggy grunted a barely-recognizable "Thanks," and downed the pills with the water. He took another few sips and made to lean forward and put it on the table.

Karen took it out of his hands for him. "How badly does it hurt? Should I look at it?"

It took him a minute to answer, and she could tell he was trying to lie about it. Matt was still half-curled against the wall behind him, though, so she knew he was answering honestly when he told her, "It's bad." Funny how used he was to always telling the truth, being around Matt for so long. He couldn't lie for shit.

Karen was better at it. "On like... a scale of one to ten, though?"

No hesitation. "Twenty."

Karen sighed and gave him an extra painkiller. He took it without question, swallowing it dry, and afterward he just sat and stared at the water lamp, shivering. His eyes were flooding with tears that he couldn't hold in anymore.

"Should I change the bandages?" she asked, turning to dig through the duffel bag.

"No! No," Foggy blurted, panic tinging his voice. "Don't... no. Don't mess with it. I gotta..." he shifted his leg again and a low groan broke from his throat. "Fuck." His voice was shaking, now, and the tears were spilling over with the pain. A low moan built up in his throat and wouldn't leave.

That got Matt moving. He whined and took a few short breaths before pushing himself away from the wall, slow and timid. Every movement was an effort, especially since he was only using his left hand, keeping the other against his side. Karen chewed on her tongue so hard she tasted blood.

Foggy half-turned his head, trying to look, but his pain locked him in place. He ended up leaning back and Matt met him halfway, burrowing his face into the crook between Foggy's neck and shoulder. One hand came up, brushed through Matt's hair, and he relaxed into the touch with a sound that Karen couldn't even sort. Something like a low, rattling moan of pain, a knife-edge of a sob, and a soft wail of relief.

"I know, buddy," Foggy breathed, and blinked the tears out of his eyes. "I'm here."

Karen sat with her hands in her lap, as awkward as ever, trying not to stare at them, but Foggy's face had relaxed more than any painkiller could have done for him, and she had to watch as he leaned his temple against Matt's head, rocking slightly. He was trying so hard not to cry that he was shaking with the struggle, but it was happening anyway, his chest shivering with the little noises that kept slipping through the cracks.

"I'm here, Matt. I'm here."

She felt like the biggest third wheel on the planet, but she still wouldn't move. Her body just wouldn't do it. Matt was struggling for air, choking on the noises coming out of his own throat. Karen could see the fear flashing back onto Foggy's face, the terror, but he was caught up too much in his own pain; she could see it shivering through his body, shaking both of them, stronger than even the aftershocks of the tremor.

But Matt was taking Foggy's pain _and_ his own, like he always fucking did, until he was shuddering with the strain of it all, stubbornly chasing his breath around and around the room but never catching it.

The wind outside was snapping against the trash bags and the tarp in the windows, and behind that came the sound of the rain as it started up again. She stared at the floor, then reached out to touch Foggy's knee, just to tell him that she was there, but he flinched away, hissed, and coughed out a groan. Matt keened softly in echo, and shut his eyes, pressing his face into Foggy's neck.

Karen never knew a single person could accept so much suffering, but there was Matt, the bottomless fucking pit. That empathy he had was what made him special, she thought, not his senses, although the senses were something she still wasn't sure she understood. The virus did a pretty good job of distracting her from that. She was supposed to be looking closer, Goddamn it, but it felt like she still had her eyes shut.

They waited a long time, the three of them, for the medication to start to work, all of them feeling the agony of the same fucking wound. It was silent except for the sounds from outside, Foggy's uneven sobbing, and Matt's scratchy breathing. A strange collection of noises that bounced off the damp walls of the apartment and congealed into something damning, sickening.

And slowly, slower than anything Karen thought she'd ever experience, Foggy's sobbing started to trail off, and his white-knuckle grip on the fabric of his pants started to loosen. He kept himself as stationary as possible, but the expression on his face was relaxing. The painkiller was starting to work.

Karen turned her head to look at the bottle, still resting next to her on the coffee table. There weren't a lot left. Eleven or twelve. She didn't know what she was going to do when they were gone.

She was putting everything back into the duffel bag when Foggy finally moved, finally shifted, and she could hear the wince tightening his voice as he spoke, "Okay, Matt, see? I'm—see? I'm all right." He wasn't. Karen didn't need Matt's hearing to know that. "Let me... let me look at _you_ now, o-okay?"

Matt made a low sound, not words, and lifted his head carefully from Foggy's neck. His chest was leaning against Foggy's back, shoulders jumping unevenly with his breaths. He seemed to steady himself for a second, figuring out what limb he should be moving first, and made his way over to the edge of the futon. It took way longer than it should have, and by the time he got himself sitting next to Foggy, he was out of breath.

"Jesus," Foggy said, placing his palms on the mattress and turning as well as he could in Matt's direction. He laid out the leg that was half-gone on the futon and used the other to push himself along the floor, scooting clumsily over. "Come here, Matty."

Matt didn't move any closer; he was too busy dancing his shivering fingertips in the empty space below Foggy's knee, head turned half to the side. His brow got caught up in itself as he frowned, blinking at the damp futon mattress as his thumb idly circled the place where a limb should have been.

"...I know, Matt," Foggy murmured.

"Lose." He spoke softly. His voice was rough and scratchy, like his breathing. "Lose. Foggy, you l-l... you lose. You hurt."

"...Yeah. Yeah, I did."

Matt's jaw worked beneath the scruff and rain burns on his face. He wouldn't remove his hand from the vacant spot on the mattress, and his uneven breathing started to get even more erratic. His eyes darted around, searching emptiness for answers to questions that he didn't even know how to ask.

Karen didn't want to watch, to look and see the devastation falling slowly across Matt's face. She busied herself with the duffel bag, putting things away, taking them out, idly reorganizing because she didn't know what else to do, but she didn't want to get up off of the table and leave them because she knew the second she turned away, something would happen, and she _couldn't let anything happen_ , not after everything else they'd just fucking gone through.

Foggy let out a low breath and gave her a split-second of a glance that she quickly looked away from. "Matt, I'm... I'm all right. I'm going to be okay."

Matt blinked rapidly for a second, his head tilting. Listening. For a moment it looked like he was going to lay light to Foggy's lie, but he just twitched his head in a shake, and repeated, faintly, "...You lose. You lost."

"I'm still me, buddy."

Matt pushed his thumb in a circle on the empty mattress. "You hurt."

Foggy's mouth pressed into a thin line. "So do you, Matt."

"I..." he let out a shivering breath, face twisting momentarily in pain. "Should... should have."

"Should have what?"

A sob was caught up in Matt's chest, rattling, trying to break free. He was holding it in, clinging to it, just like earlier in that rainy alleyway, because he knew how much it would hurt if he let it out. "Not go. Not leave you." He lowered his head until his chin was nearly touching his chest and shuddered the sob out. Pain leapt across his face, but Karen wasn't sure exactly where from. "I am s—sor— _sor_ —"

"That's enough, okay? Y—"

"—Sor _ry_. Fog," he hissed out, then tried to suck another breath in, but it tripped in his throat and his expression shattered as he started coughing. Wet and loud and awful, with sharp, high whines tangled into the sounds. He was clutching at his side, eyes wide and darting around in a panic as he tried to breathe but couldn't get anything in between coughs.

Karen moved forward to try to help, but even in his struggle Matt knew she was there, and flinched away.

"No, no, no." Foggy wasn't even paying attention to her, or even himself. He dragged himself forward, steadying Matt's left shoulder with one hand and spreading the other against his chest. "Breathe, Matty, you need to breathe."

Matt made one of those low whines, scrabbling at his own throat, whimpering in fear. He coughed, retched, coughed again, retched again, the most awful fucking noises Karen had ever heard, but there wasn't anything coming out of him. His other hand was scratching uselessly at the mattress and the other dropped and clung hard to Foggy's wrist.

"Shh, shh, you just need to breathe," Foggy was saying, voice low, trying to be as calming as possible. Karen could still hear the terror. "Easy, easy, just breathe, like me." He took Matt's hand and placed it on his own chest. "Like me. In and out. You feel me breathing? Nod if you can feel it."

Karen could only stare, horrified, as Matt started panicking, clawing harder at the mattress. He thrashed a few times, instinctive and weak, against nothing but the stagnant air of the apartment, like he could fight off what was choking him, but there wasn't anything attacking him that wasn't his own body.

"No, no. Pay attention." Foggy kept talking, calm and even on the surface, but underneath it all, Karen could hear how tremulous and pain-filled his voice was trying _not_ to be. "Focus, Matty. Focus on me."

He struggled to acquiesce to his instructions, but he was trying, God was he trying. She wanted to reach out, but her shaking hands stayed where they were, afraid of scaring him even more than he already was.

"Focus. _Focus_. Just breathe like me, okay? Breathe. In and out. _In_ and _out._ "

Karen was so sure that Matt was about to collapse, lose consciousness, suffocate to death two feet in front of her, but then he finally started to drag in short, feeble breaths in between coughs. Foggy just kept encouraging him and rubbing his chest, and after what felt like an eternity his coughing trailed off, and he was back to gasping for air.

Even the gasps sounded better than the coughing. There were tears soaking his face, gathering and re-gathering into his eyes. He was sobbing, Karen realized, heaving and silent, eyes darting around rapidly in what she knew was panic and terror. It looked like he wanted to say something but he didn't, too afraid he'd start coughing again if he tried.

"Good. That's great, buddy. In and out. Just breathe. It's gonna be okay, Matt."

His shaking fingers were still wrapped tightly around Foggy's wrist, but he attempted a shaking, twitching nod, and mostly succeeded.

"Good, good, good. Awesome, Matt. Let me—" he wiggled his hand out of Matt's weakened grasp and moved it to his shoulder to tug him closer. The one Karen had stabbed.

She felt herself wince in reflex before Matt barked out a sharp and rattling yelp of pain, flinching away and shoving Foggy's hand off of his shoulder, jerking back from his friend like a wounded animal. He tried to say something, probably a "No," but he didn't get past the first consonant.

"Whoa, whoa, it's okay," Foggy murmured, voice careful and gentle. He dropped his hands to his lap, but Karen saw his fingers twitching like he was debating whether or not to try again. The tears were coming back into his eyes, the pain crossing his face, stiffening his expression. "What is it?"

Matt stared at the mattress and twitched his head. "'M'fn," he mumbled, mostly incomprehensible. Karen thought she heard an attempted 'I'm fine', but she'd never be certain of it. It was hard to be certain with him. Unless it was his next word, which was, of course, "Foggy."

"Yeah, just me." Foggy glanced at Karen and she had to look away. "Can you come closer, Matty? I need to look you over."

Unsurprisingly, Matt hesitated again, fiddling with the seam of his hoodie pocket.

Foggy was getting impatient, but him and Matt arguing was just an example of the whole unstoppable force/immovable object paradox, and he had to know that more than anyone. Instead, he tried another approach. God, he always knew what to do.

"Matt, you gotta come over here or I'm gonna have to come over there, and I'm only like ninety-five percent of a person right now." His voice was trying so hard to be strong, but it was crumbling at the edges, cracked all the way down to the foundation. " _Help_ me, man."

The guilt angle. Foggy didn't use it often, but whenever he did, it always worked. It was the same this time, too, and Matt puffed out a sigh before bracing his hands on the mattress and slowly scooting forward.

"Awesome, buddy," Foggy said as Matt came close enough that he could finally touch more than just his chest. He ran a hand down his shivering arm, patted his knee, like he was confirming with his own hands that Matt was still there, that he still existed. "Can... can you take your sweater off for me?"

Karen stared, like an animal on a train rail, feeling the cold rush back into her. He was going to find out. She was so fucking dead.

Matt's head was half-bowed. He pushed out a quiet huff, then tilted his head and mumbled a, "Foggy, yes," before pulling off his stained and tattered hoodie. It took a lot of effort, and Karen could see where the rain had eaten it away in places.

There was a strained silence between the three of them as Matt got the hoodie off over his head and bundled it tentatively in his lap. He'd always looked unhealthy—gaunt and pale and stringy, but now... Jesus. Karen could tell he'd lost weight. She didn't even know he'd had any he _could_ lose. There were more scratches and bites on him than she could remember seeing before. Layers and layers of what he'd done to himself in order to keep them all safe. The ACE wasn't around his ribs anymore—it was wrapped around his right shoulder and arm, stained black and brown from rain and blood.

"Oh, Matty," Foggy breathed, hitching himself up as he tried to get closer, reaching out almost on a reflex. The massive bruise on Matt's side was still there, less black now, more purple and green. Foggy swallowed as he hovered his hand over the ribs. "Are these the broken ones?" he asked, and it sounded like there was something cold and wet stuck in his throat.

"Yes," Matt answered, barely audible.

Foggy chewed on his bottom lip and then settled his hand on them as gently as he could. Matt still twitched and whined, but didn't try to scramble away like he had for Karen in the maintenance room. Foggy spoke over him. "Breathe, buddy, can you do that for me? Let me see 'em move."

Matt jerked his head in a clear and obvious 'no'. "Hurts."

"I know it hurts, but I need to see."

He let the air out slowly, and then brought in another breath twice as slowly; Karen could see the muscles on his left side shivering, his right side shuddering. Constant movement that he couldn't control. Foggy was concentrating, staring at Matt's chest as he breathed, keeping his hand spread across the massive bruise.

"They're not flail, that's good," Foggy murmured, and Karen didn't know what that meant. He dropped his hand, and Matt's face relaxed a little, but then his brow stiffened right back up again as Foggy found the ACE wrapped around his arm. Foggy brushed his fingertips along the edge of the bandage, frowning. "What happened here, Matty?"

Karen kept staring. Matt's jaw was jumping, eyes roving around, seeking words. He shifted a bit, as if restless, then moved a little closer to Foggy, leaning in so he could get to the bandage. "Foggy, um. Tunnel. It— _nnn_ ," his words fell away to a low whine as Foggy carefully peeled the bandage away from the wound.

"Jesus, Matt," he whispered. "This is... what is this? It's..." he winced, although it was impossible to tell which thing was causing him pain, and leaned in to take a closer look. Karen didn't want to see it, but there it was. Deep and swollen, red and yellow. She couldn't believe she'd done it to him. "It's... really infected, buddy."

Matt fiddled with the sweater in his lap. "Foggy. Knife."

Karen chewed hard on one of her thumbnails, trying to distract herself with the pain. It didn't do a goddamned thing. She wanted to stand up, but it was like her feet were glued to the floor, they wouldn't budge at all.

"What knife, Matt? Who took a knife to you?" Foggy asked—no, demanded. There was fury in his voice, glowing bright beyond his own pain. He tapped his thumb around the edges of the wound, then placed his other hand on Matt's unhurt shoulder when he didn't get a reply. "Matty. You need to tell me."

Matt was angling his face away, like he always did when he was uncomfortable or wanted to hide. He didn't say anything, his fingers twitching restlessly along the fabric in his lap, a soft frown tugging at his lips.

Foggy's expression twisted; he reached over and brushed his thumb along Matt's jaw, gently turning him so that they were face to face. "Buddy, please," he breathed, his other hand still on Matt's shoulder. "Don't do this to me."

For a long minute, Matt's eyes darted around as he tried to find something to say.

Karen opened her mouth and spoke first.

"I did it."

The rush of relief that came out alongside the words baffled her.

Foggy went very still. Matt lifted his chin in her direction, eyebrows pushed tightly together. Nobody talked for a long couple of moments, but as always, Foggy was the one who broke the silence. His voice shook with fury, even as weak as it was, as he was.

" _You_ did this to him?"

Karen could not lift her eyes from the floor. "It... I didn't... I..."

If Foggy could walk, she knew he would have been on his feet and in her face already. As it was, she considered moving closer to him, because whatever he was going to throw at her, she deserved it. She absolutely fucking deserved it.

His voice was a growl. "You fucking st—"

Matt lifted his head suddenly, cutting him off. "Foggy, no. It is okay."

"No, it isn't, Matt. Stop saying things are okay. This is beyond fucking 'okay'!" he snapped, a tone that would normally have Matt recoiling, hustling to obedience, frantically trying to fix it.

Instead, Matt kept his chin lifted, and spoke as quietly as he always did. Even with his breathing, every word was as clear as his voice could make them. "Scared her, Foggy. Sc... I scared her. Karen. She did not mean." He licked his lips. "Not... not her f... it was not... not Karen's fault, Foggy." Matt tilted his head toward her. "I am feral. I understand this."

"Matt—" Foggy started, then wavered, bringing one hand to his face and dragging it rough and sudden down his expression, "— _Jesus_." She could see the anger on his face, and how he was trying to force it down. He wouldn't look at her, instead drawing his eyes back to the wound, red and inflamed as it was.

Karen swallowed a few times before speaking, very quietly. "It... it was an accident. I didn't mean t..." a shuddering sob splintered apart her words; she rushed to put them back together, "...I was... I was scared, Foggy. For you. And me. He..." _was covered in fucking blood and snarling at me and you know now, you_ know _why I'm like this, why can't you_ understand, "...it just... it happened, and... I couldn't... couldn't take it back."

Foggy wouldn't look at her, wouldn't even respond to her.

"I'm _sorry_ ," she breathed.

No response. She wanted to puke. He had both his hands back on Matt's arm, thumbs on each side of the injury. Matt stayed still and quiet, his head bowed, his jaw tightening as Foggy tugged him a little closer to get a better look. From where Karen was sitting, she could see another wound on the back of his arm, and she realized with freezing dismay that she'd put the knife all the way through him. She found herself fiddling with her fingers—a lot like the man in front of her would—and trying very hard to ignore the burning sensation in her eyes as Foggy studied the wound.

His voice was soft, gentle. "Can you lift your arm, buddy?"

Matt made a mixed noise in his chest, a growl or a whine, distorted, because he was trying to stay quiet. So she wouldn't hear it. He'd done it for a long time when they'd first started living together. His shaking hand fiddled with the seam of his pants, and he didn't try to pick up the other one. "Hurts."

"No kidding." Foggy turned suddenly toward her and she jumped. He didn't apologize; his voice was brusque and his eyes wouldn't make contact with hers. "I need my medical bag."

Karen fumbled for it, shoving the pills back inside as she handed it over. "Is i—"

"And water."

She fell silent, then got to her feet and moved off to the kitchen, leaving the vinegar lamp behind. The space was familiar enough to her that she didn't trip and break her neck, but she almost preferred that to gathering a dinged plastic cup of water and carrying it back to the futon. Without speaking, she pushed the coffee table closer to the futon and set the cup down.

Foggy dug through the bag and grabbed the penlight. The bulb was weak, dying, and he had to shake it a few times before it actually lit up. He held it between his pinky and ring finger and shifted himself closer until Matt was pressed up against his chest and the wound was right in front of him.

Karen sat, silent and terrified and as awkward as fucking ever, and watched Foggy hold the penlight in his mouth as he slowly cleared away the blackened residue of the rain and caked blood with shaking hands. She could smell the river, and the sick-sweet smell of pus and infection. It just wasn't on Foggy that time.

Matt stayed quiet and still, eventually leaning his head down and resting it on Foggy's shoulder, breathing like sandpaper and shivering all over. He swallowed a lot, forcing down the noises that he knew she didn't like, but as Foggy got to clearing the pus out, she could see the tears in his eyes and how he was trying to stow them away against Foggy's neck.

"It's okay, buddy," Foggy spoke, mostly under his breath, like he didn't want Karen to hear. "Almost done. You're doing great," he mumbled, and it only made Matt burrow in harder against his neck. Foggy's touch was so well-practiced and gentle, even while he was missing a great deal of one leg and clearly still fighting off the fever that was trying to take him away from both of them.

Karen wondered what they'd done to deserve a man like him.

With the pus cleaned off, she could see the gash left by the knife. It wasn't a massive wound, but the swelling was making it look a lot bigger. Matt was lucky that she hadn't hit an artery. Maybe she'd hit a tendon, though, and that was why he couldn't lift his arm worth a damn anymore, and... God. She didn't want to think about it. So, of course, she absolutely could not stop thinking about it. Karen chewed hard on her thumbnail until she tasted bitter blood and the river.

Foggy seemed content with his work, and shuffled around in the bag to find a couple of butterfly strips. It _did_ look better—God, he was good at it. She opened her mouth to ask why he wasn't placing stitches, but closed her lips before any sounds could come out.

Matt only whined once, while Foggy was placing the strips, but she could see his whole spine stiffen up with the pain that he was struggling to breathe around. Foggy trailed his fingers around the wound when he was done, and then sat and waited for Matt to get his breath back, glaring at nothing, not even Karen. "Easy, buddy, just breathe. In and out. It's okay."

It took a long time, so long that she thought Matt might have passed out, but the second she shifted and tried to say something, he lifted his head from Foggy's shoulder and she shut her mouth again. His eyes were red, face doused with tears. Gasping for air and wincing at the struggle, his expression pleading, just wanting the pain to stop.

"I know it hurts. I'm here. I'm here." Foggy closed the space between them, pushing their foreheads together, and Matt's expression crumpled and he melted into it, sobbing silently, his shaking hand twisting up in Foggy's shirt like it was the only thing that was grounding him to the earth. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm right here."

Karen had gnawed her thumbnail down to nothing and moved onto her index finger. They were going to start looking like Matt's soon. He always chewed on them when he thought nobody was watching.

Foggy had his fingers pushed into Matt's choppy hair, and pulled back to tap his thumb on his uninjured shoulder. Strands of hair became trapped in Foggy's fingers. "Here, buddy. You need to take something for the pain, okay?" His other hand found the duffel bag, and as he leaned away from Matt to rummage through it, Matt simply followed, prolonging the contact.

Karen hated that she spoke up. "There's, uh... another, uh. On the... back of his arm."

Foggy looked at her, that time, _really_ looked at her, and she knew immediately that she'd never forget it, that his knife-edged gaze would remain a snapshot in her memory, forever, never fading, never flickering. She could see a scorching, walled-off rage that seemed to overtake even Matt's howling fury in the subway tunnel, and she faltered, but couldn't look away, locked in and resigned to whatever punishment she was going to receive.

Foggy's jaw twitched, and even that tiny movement made her jolt. For a half-second, she reflexively considered running. Gathering up what few possessions she had and just leaving them.

He looked away, and said nothing, and then she knew that no, she couldn't abandon them, she couldn't do that do that, not to them, not after everything else. Karen blew out a breath and shivered and rubbed her face, free from that paralyzing fear. Her voice came out of her like a dead thing from the ground.

" _I'm sorry_. Foggy, I'm really, _really_ , I'm—"

"I don't want to fucking hear it."

"I—"

"Shut up, Karen." His voice was a corpse just like her own, and he blinked what she knew were tears from his eyes as he dug back into the duffel for more gauze, and turned Matt halfway around to check the exit wound. From this angle, it didn't seem as bad. It was scabbing and red, but she couldn't see pus. That was good. Right?

Matt chewed on something invisible in his mouth as Foggy worked, cleaning the wound off with water from the cup, leaning in close to study it, and then pulling back without dressing it.

"Is it bad?" she asked.

Foggy didn't answer her. She fiddled her hands in her lap and wondered what sort of jobs they had to fill at Yonkers while Matt got himself turned back around so he could burrow back into Foggy's chest again.

"No. Hold on," Foggy breathed, sniffing once before moving away, keeping one hand on Matt's shoulder to hold him at arm's length. He dug out the bottle of painkillers—the ones they were running out of—and she saw him frown as he realized how many were actually left. The bottle rattled faintly as he opened it and fished two of them out. "Matt, take—"

"No." Matt spoke with a sudden alacrity and shook his head jerkily. "No. I don't w—"

"Don't give me that shit," Foggy snapped, making both Matt and Karen jump. Karen flinched backwards; Matt lowered his head in reflexive submission. "Fucking take these. Okay? I need you to take them."

Matt was silent again, shivering, blinking the tears out of his eyes, and Foggy tapped the back of his shaking hand and placed the tablets in his palm before grabbing the cup of water. Tiny little noises were coming out between Matt's breaths. He rubbed his shivering thumb along the top of the medication. "Foggy, you—"

" _Take_. Them."

A loud, short huff, and Matt curled his fingers around the tablets, used the back of his hand to wipe his eyes, then shoved the pills in his mouth. Foggy gave him what was left of the water and at first he only sipped at it, but then he seemed to realize how thirsty he was, and downed the whole cup.

"There. Not so bad, right?" Foggy asked, but the harshness hadn't gone from his voice, nor had the submission fled from Matt's posture. "Okay, come closer. Can I listen to your breathing?"

Hesitation. Matt gnawed on his bottom lip, turning his face away.

"Matt. Please."

"...I don't want," he murmured, faint and weak.

There was anger on Foggy's face. Anger, and fear, and so much worry that she wasn't sure how any other emotion could exist there. He swallowed, then reached across the space and took Matt's shaking hand. "Why?"

Matt twitched and took his hand back, curling it up against his own body, out of reach. His mouth opened but nothing came out, and his eyes slid around sluggishly as he tried to reach across the damage ripped through his brain. Eventually, he settled on a low grunt, and a shake of his head, and no speech at all.

Foggy shifted and tried to hide his hard wince with a harder frown. Karen still saw it. He reached out again, touching what was closest—Matt's knee, which he didn't try to pull back. All the irritation and anger was gone from his voice, it was back to that gentle, prodding tone that she only ever heard him give to Matt. "Talk to me, buddy. Don't hide."

If Matt weren't feral, Karen might have attributed his behavior to shame or embarrassment, but she knew better than that. She'd been with him longer than that.

He was afraid.

But Foggy had been with him the longest of all, and already knew. "Why are you so scared, Matt?"

"Mm."

Foggy glared at the futon mattress and let out a short, quiet sigh. "...Is that why you ran, buddy? Is that why you didn't come back? You were scared?"

"...Yes," Matt answered, hesitant.

"Of Karen?"

Matt jolted slightly, shook his head the best he could. Emphatic. "No." Karen wished she could feel relief.

"Me?"

"No. Foggy, no."

"...Who, Matt?"

He kept his face turned away, and rubbed his chest weakly with his shivering hand. "Me." There were more tears coming, trailing over the scabbed gash on his face, the scratches and scrapes on his neck. "Don't... I don't..." he pushed out a rough breath, took in another with a measured slowness so that it would hurt less. "I am... am f—"

"Feral. I _know_. I don't fucking _care_ , Matt."

A horrible noise came from his throat, some kind of sob twisted and corrupted by a growl, a mesh of the man he was trying so hard to be and the animal he was trying so hard to suppress. "Foggy, not... I am not..." he swallowed hard, tried to clear his throat, failed, "...I am not _safe_."

Foggy's expression stiffened, and she knew that he was remembering the subway bathroom, what he'd said, and knew that Matt had heard him. Of course Matt had heard him. He removed his hand from Matt's knee, staring at the mattress, at the ruined leftovers of his leg. His eyelids fluttered and he sighed, a long, loud one, rubbing the side of his face that wasn't bruised and swollen from when the pack had ambushed them in the tunnels.

Karen sat in the quiet that was stagnating amongst all three of them, listening to Matt breathe, the static noises of the weather outside.

"You _weren't_ safe, Matt," Foggy spoke after a while, voice so soft Karen could barely hear it.

Matt _did_ hear, though; it was apparent by the way his expression faltered and he lowered his head, blinking tears out of his eyes. He put his hands down on the mattress and made to slip away, but Foggy shook his head and grabbed Matt's wrist first, holding him fast. Karen could see the tremor spilling over to Foggy's hand.

"No. No, Matt, stay with me."

It took a long moment for the words to come. "Don't... I don't... don't want to... hurt you," Matt managed, wincing as he tried to prise Foggy's fingers off of his wrist. He was so weak, even with his good hand. "Foggy, not."

"You're not going to hurt me, Matt. Why do you think that?"

Matt was still working at Foggy's fingers, but he wasn't strong enough. It hurt to see him so weak, so pale and tired and done with it all. "Not safe," Matt said, with the same amount of conviction he'd had in the alleyway. "I hurt."

"Not me, Matt. You'd never hurt me. You _saved_ me."

His eyes were darting around, circling and circling, like the thoughts in his head, ceaseless and bewildering—just like the ones taking residence in Karen's. He sobbed, and tried to shake his head again, but Foggy just dragged him closer. Matt fought, trying to pull himself away, to remove the danger from all of their lives, but Foggy only tugged harder.

"Foggy, no."

"Stop it, Matt. Just stop. Come here. It's okay."

"No. No, no. Foggy."

" _Matt_. You aren't going to hurt me. You never have. And you never will." One more tug and Matt was close enough for Foggy to wrap his arms around, to pull him close, smother Matt's fear of himself and what he'd become with that bright warmth Foggy'd always had, the one that the world couldn't drive out no matter how hard it tried, a pool of dappled sunshine that he ushered them all into, together and whole.

And it repeated itself, Karen's life, all of their lives, and Foggy put a hand on the back of Matt's neck and Matt relaxed into it, shoving his forehead against Foggy's shoulder, the awful noise of his breathing interrupted by his sobs. He couldn't silence them, not this time, and he sounded like a tortured animal, something taking its final, desperate breaths as the light fled its eyes.

"Shh, shh. It's okay. It's okay."

"I'm sorry," Matt whimpered. "Sorry. Sorry."

"Shh." Foggy wrapped his arms more tightly around that shivering, still-too-scrawny frame, ghosting one hand down Matt's back, up along one arm. "Just breathe. Breathe."

It was a struggle against the pain, but Matt did it for Foggy, like he always would, and Karen sat and stared and wondered what to do, like _she_ always would. Again, she felt the urge to get up, walk away, separate herself from their radius, but she couldn't summon the strength to plant her feet and pick herself up from the table.

"Breathe, Matty," Foggy mumbled, moving one hand from Matt's back to his chest, splaying his fingers out like before, encouraging him like nobody else could. "Deeper. You need to take bigger breaths, okay?" There was pain on his face, but he wasn't concentrating on it. Foggy was too caught up in Matt's damage to consider his own, and she knew that Matt was doing the same thing, just in reverse.

"Hurts."

"I know. But it'll help you feel better, I promise."

Matt grunted, and she thought she could hear the annoyance in it. A noise he often made when Foggy made him take care of himself. She could see his shoulders rising, up and down, up and down, as he took slowly increasing breaths. Always ready to do what Foggy asked, even if it killed him.

"Oh, that's great, Matty. Keep doing that, okay?"

"'Kay." Matt shifted his head and rested his temple on Foggy's shoulder, like before. There was a glaze, an emptiness to his eyes that she wasn't sure had been there earlier. They were always empty, but it seemed deeper now, darker. Exhaustion, probably. Hopefully.

They stayed like that for a long while, until Matt's breathing was evening out. The painkiller going to work. Karen didn't know if he'd taken that specific drug before, if it had made him sick. Like it mattered. Foggy's first priority was probably trying to alleviate the pain.

He didn't look at her, not once in the entire time he sat and let Matt rest against him. His eyes were everywhere _but_ her—along the wall, the futon, the floor—and he didn't say anything to her, either. All she could do was sit and stew in the quiet, because her feet wouldn't pick her up and take her away. Not with the worry of what might happen if she turned her back on them. Foggy could fall, or Matt could die, and those things wouldn't come to pass if she kept her eyes on them.

Then Foggy shifted a little, and Matt lifted his head sluggishly. Drool fucking everywhere. Foggy didn't even notice, too busy leaning in close to study Matt's face—no, his eyes.

"You with us, buddy?" Foggy asked softly, tapping one shaking thumb on Matt's neck.

There wasn't much of a response, except Matt licking idly at his lips, trying to catch the drool. Karen couldn't even tell if it was because he was tired or because of the medication. He made a gurgling humming noise, and then a garbled, "...Tired."

"Yeah, and you can sleep in a minute. I need your help first."

Matt grumbled out a mouthful of nonsense and leaned back in to replace his head on Foggy's shoulder, but Foggy caught him by the arms and stopped him.

"No sleeping yet. I need to listen to your breathing, okay?"

"Ngh."

"Don't bitch. Can you turn around?"

Matt grunted another sequence of syllables that made zero sense, and Foggy just sighed, and pushed gently at Matt's unhurt shoulder while tugging at the other one. "This way." It took a lot of maneuvering, and Karen reached out once to steady him but Foggy locked her with a glare that froze her in place like the action had physically slapped her.

She dropped her hands in her lap and wondered, for a short minute, how much gas was left in the truck. No, she couldn't leave. She couldn't do that to them.

But Foggy got Matt turned around, enough that he could lean down and press an ear between Matt's shoulder blades. Foggy's face twisted for a split-second as he shifted his leg, and then he was he looking around aimlessly as he listened, never letting his eyes land anywhere near Karen. "Keep breathing. Deeper, buddy."

Matt struggled to do as asked, and exhaled with a sharp whine, garbling a word in his throat that never left his lips. She wondered what that sounded like with an ear against his chest.

Foggy caught her gaze, finally, for a split-second, but then he shook his head minutely, listened for a few more respirations, then pulled away from Matt's back. He sniffed a few times, pushed tears out of his eyes with his knuckles. His voice was wavering. "Okay, buddy, that's all." He rubbed a hand on Matt's shoulder, chewing on his lip.

Karen felt a nauseatingly cold rush of fear. "What is it?"

He wouldn't look at her, but he frowned, let out a breath. "It's a ch..." Foggy shook his head harder, idly running his hand along Matt's arm. "He's got a chest infection. I think."

"Oh, God." Karen felt the chill rocket up her legs and blast through her chest. "From his ribs? The rain?"

It looked like he would rather set himself on fire than talk to her about it. "Yeah, probably." His voice was dead.

She responded anyway. "What do we do?"

Foggy sniffed again, and his face crumpled when Matt wiggled himself backwards until their sides were touching. "Antibiotics. And prayer."

Matt rested his head on Foggy's shoulder, and she didn't know that Foggy's face could fall any more than it already did, but there it went, straight down to the core of the earth. He sucked in a sob, but still reached up to push his fingers through Matt's hair, and he melted into it, as always, letting out a low rumble of relief as his glazed eyes fluttered shut.

Karen was damned to keep asking questions that she didn't even want the answers to. "...Is he going to be okay?"

Foggy blinked at the wall, tried to gather himself, failed. "No." He took a breath, and spoke slowly at first, "None of us are going to be okay, Karen. You understand that? We'll never be okay. We were never okay to fucking start with." He twisted his fingers in Matt's hair and Matt just shifted closer. His words sped up. "He's got... fucking... _pneumonia_ , I'm... my fucking leg. There's no comeback from this. Not this time."

Karen shook her head. "You said that the last time."

He huffed and looked away, searching the stained wall across the living room with damp, reddened eyes. Matt looked like he was asleep, shivering hand tucked against Foggy's elbow, head twitching itself along Foggy's cheek. She could see goosebumps on his arm.

Struck suddenly with something that she could actually do, Karen got to her feet, wordlessly taking the lamp with her as she slipped into the storage room. They didn't own a dresser, just milk crates full of socks, jeans, shirts. She grabbed one and started sifting through it, frowning at how they'd all been folded and put carefully away. Laundry was Foggy's job.

_Everything_ seemed to be his job, she thought, as she grabbed the softest hoodie she could find, then another, and then she just piled the cleanest articles they had into the same crate and brought it all out at once. She set it down next to the duffel bag, ignoring how Foggy was ignoring her. They hadn't moved at all, and Matt's eyes were shut, chest jumping erratically as he breathed.

"I brought some—"

"Yeah," Foggy cut her off, reaching for the crate. She helped him get it into his hands, and then sat back on the table again and watched silently as he got a clean set for Matt and helped him get them on. Matt wasn't fighting him, but it was like all his energy had been drained out and left to dry on the floor next to the tattered, stained clothes that Foggy dropped in a wet heap next to the futon. She couldn't remember what color the hoodie had been before. It was brown and black now.

Matt's left arm was a goddamned earthquake, rattling between him and Foggy, and Karen tried not to focus on it, on what it was, on what it meant. She failed miserably, and found herself tucking her legs up onto the coffee table to put more distance between her and Matt. Her backslide had been so steep and slick that it was a wonder she could even stand to be in the same room as him. Karen thought about Yonkers again, and again, she pushed the idea out of her head.

"No, no, don't lie down yet," Foggy grunted as Matt tried to burrow into a blanket, tugging him weakly back upright. He paused for a moment as Matt swayed, then turned away when it looked like he was going to keep himself up on his own. Karen handed him the bag of medication and he took it without looking at her. "I want you to take some more medication, okay?"

Matt groaned airily. Even now, a stubborn prick. "No."

"Yes. Stay sitting up."

Matt had to lean his hands hard on the mattress underneath him to stop from falling over. He looked like he was about to pass out, and Karen didn't know how much of that was because of the painkiller and how it was affected by his fucked-up metabolism. His breathing did seem to be coming easier, or that was just her wishful thinking, something she'd never had before she started living with them.

Foggy started going through the bottles, tilting them into the lamp-light so he could read them. Karen nudged the lamp closer. He ignored her, and started piling pills into his lap. Some of them she knew—the antibiotics, mainly, two different kinds, neither of which would probably work with Matt's immune system, but Foggy was going to try anyway, because he was Foggy. There were a couple more, and she thought Tylenol at first, but there was writing on them.

"Midol?" she asked, and heard a surprising amount of humor in her voice. It wasn't specifically for her, although she did use it, but...

"It's got a diuretic in it," he explained, half-heartedly.

"I don't know what that is."

"Shocker." He gathered the pills up in his hand and tapped his thumb on Matt's wrist automatically before handing them over.

Karen stood and refilled the water cup. Matt grumbled and couldn't have been less interested if he tried, but he took the pills, finished the water, and then Foggy helped him to lie down on the mattress. God, he was pale.

The silence came back again. She struggled to find something to break it apart while Foggy wrestled out of his own messed-up clothes. He needed help with the pants, and she did it without talking, feeling her heart climb up into her throat at every tiny, pained noise he made. His skin was mottled with rain burns, just like her own. Matt looked like he'd taken a second dip in the Hudson, which wasn't too far from the truth. They changed the bandages and she brought the lamp close so he could inspect her work, but he didn't say anything about how poorly she'd done, and afterward they sat in the suffocating silence until she finally dared to open her mouth again.

She swallowed eight or nine times before asking, "Do you need the bathroom?"

He glared at the floor. "Yeah."

It was just as awkward as the last time. Karen thought about the truck and where she'd left the keys to it. She thought about what to take and what to leave, what belonged to her and what belonged to Matt, because ninety-percent of the stuff in the apartment had been scavenged by him.

If she went by how ferals worked, most everything was his by association, even though she had long stopped damning him with the term 'feral' way back when they'd first come to the apartment, and she'd broken to pieces, and the two of them had so carefully put her back together again.

But that didn't change the truth of what he was. The virus made the entire apartment his. The truck was his. The guns, the food, the purifier, the supplies were his. Foggy was his.

Karen was still nobody's, and she let the thought follow her like a shadow until she laid down on the couch to try to sleep.

\---

Sleep didn't come, not in any way she noticed. Maybe short spurts that she jerked herself out of before they could even start, but nothing that actually felt like rest. The rain petered out, came back, then faded again. There were distant wails, shrieks, and scattered beeping that seemed so much louder without glass in the windows. They never seemed to come close enough to be a danger, but she couldn't tell.

Her thoughts chased each other, back and forth, back and forth. The apartment was freezing and her blanket was still damp. There were warmer places she could go. Places where she'd be useful. Places where she wouldn't feel so gouged-out and worthless. Places where she wasn't a danger to the ones who loved her.

It took a while for her to realize she was crying, silently, and she hid her face in the blanket to hide it even though it was pitch black in the living room. She tried to sleep, and she was so tired, but nothing happened; her thoughts continued to jounce around in her head and all she could do was sluggishly focus on them, one at a time, begging for them to leave.

She woke up without realizing she'd been asleep to a sound that her exhaustion-doused brain initially imagined to be a hacksaw dragging across bone, but then she opened her eyes and knew it was the sound of weak, ragged gasping. The sound of speech followed after, quiet and agonized and afraid.

"No no no, come on, buddy, sit up. You'll breathe better."

There was a throaty little noise that she knew came from Matt, but she couldn't find any words in it. She pushed herself up off of the couch, fumbling for the vinegar lamp and turning it on. The light was weak but it was enough for her to see what was happening—Foggy was sitting up on the futon with Matt half-draped over one shoulder, and his skin was so pale he was nearly another light source.

She put the lamp on the coffee table and sat back down in the spot that had, apparently, become hers after this whole fucking debacle. The medical duffel was still there, the bottle of painkillers lying on its side next to it. There were so few left. She knew there was still Tylenol. Midol.

Matt was struggling just to breathe, his noises more like reflexive half-gasps than anything else. It wasn't clear if he was awake, but she could see a sheen of sweat on him, his eyes glazed, the tremor rattling crazily against the mattress. Foggy yanked and fought with his own pain to get Matt sitting up and leaning against him, rubbing his chest, encouraging him to breathe, just breathe, _Matt, just fucking keep breathing, don't you fucking stop breathing._

It seemed to Karen like he was going to, very soon, that he'd stop thrashing against that final sleep dragging him down, that he'd stop being so fucking stubborn and immovable and lie down, submit, give in, but he didn't. Sitting upright actually did help, and he started taking deeper breaths, and the color started coming back to his skin.

"There. There you go. Keep breathing for me. You're doing good," Foggy whispered, trying to stay quiet, because it was still the middle of the night, and the distant noises were still sounding off outside. "Good, Matt, good."

Matt's trembling fingers ghosted along Foggy's hand on his chest. She couldn't believe he was even awake, aware of what was happening. "Hurts."

"I'll get you more pills in a minute. I need you to stay upright."

He made a whimpering moan that he cut off by biting his own lip, his instincts intact even then, forcing himself to stay as quiet as possible. His temple was against Foggy's cheek, his hair oily with residue from the rain, and damn, it was going to hurt when he went to wash it out. If he lived long enough to wash it out. He choked down a low noise and shifted clumsily, an action that she wasn't sure had a purpose.

Karen moved forward to help, maybe to stop him from tumbling to the floor, but Matt made a sharp sound—fear—and Foggy grabbed her upper arm with a strength she didn't know he had, shoving her away, an echo of Matt's snarl in his throat, his words soaked with pain. "Stay the fuck away from him."

She tugged her arm from his grip, shaking her head. "Let me help," she breathed, trying to get closer.

"You've helped enough, Karen. Sit _up_ , Matt."

Matt was still whining in fear, but she couldn't tell if it was because of her or because he couldn't catch his breath, couldn't get enough air. He kept leaning against Foggy and Karen eventually moved, grabbing the lamp and bending down next to the futon to find the latch so she could push it into the upright position. She felt herself wince when it clicked loudly into place, but there were no answering wails from outside, just Matt's breathing from inside.

"Here. Lean back," Foggy murmured, guiding Matt to lean against the backrest, ignoring the half-bewildered look that crossed his pale face when he tried to figure out how he was still upright without leaning against Foggy. "Just stay there, okay?"

Matt whimpered once, an animal in pain, then sucked in a breath and started coughing again. It was so loud, and it was still nighttime—all three of them went into a shared state of half-panic, Matt trying to silence himself, Foggy trying to stop his coughing, and Karen sitting and clutching her hands and doing absolutely fucking nothing. She hated herself more than anything, more than the poison, and the virus, and even the living silver that had done this to all of them.

Thank God, Matt got himself under control, rubbing harshly at his own chest as Foggy rubbed his back, swallowing down noises and whatever it was he was coughing up. It smelled like death. Probably because it was.

For a long few minutes, they stayed there, in the silence, all of them straining to hear if they were being rounded on, that they'd been heard and pinpointed in the darkness. It wasn't the first time. She hoped, selfishly, that it would be the last.

But nothing attacked them, nothing drew closer and leapt in through the shattered windows. They were safe. She wanted to feel relief, but there was nothing in her at all. Just exhaustion and the sensation like she'd been stretched out too far, a guitar string about to snap.

And of course, she had to lean forward, to try to help again. Reflex or instinct or that tempered gentleness that Foggy had excavated from the ruin she'd made of herself, dug out and placed in her hands and let her rebuild and keep. She wanted to throw it on the ground and shatter it, because this wasn't safe, it _hurt_ , so badly that she'd rather feel nothing than have to bear the pain any longer.

Foggy batted her hand away. "Fuck off, Karen, just... I just need you to _go_ , okay?" It was clear that he'd had spent most of the night stewing in it, thinking about it, just like she'd been swimming through her own muddled brain. She could tell by the tone of his voice, how his words spilled out of him, a low and threatening hiss. "He trusted you, Karen. He _trusted you!"_ She'd never heard him speak like that, in all the time she'd known him. It was scarier than Matt roaring. It was scarier than the noises echoing out in the city.

Her chest felt like she'd been turned upside down and shaken until everything was dislodged and bared to the cold. The words tasted like rain in her mouth. "I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to hurt him."

"No, you never fucking do. But you did."

The worry, the fear and the guilt coalesced and turned warm, then hot, then blistering. She whispered through her fury, heard it echoing along the walls, everything coming out of her brain and her mouth with a dizzying clarity. "Don't you fucking understand what _I've_ been going through? Dragging you out of that fucking tunnel? Cutting your goddamn leg off with a fucking hacksaw? You have no idea what I've been through."

He gave her a split-second glare and had to roll the words around in his mouth for a long moment before letting them out. "He's dying, Karen."

She stuttered to a stop. The anger died inside of her like everything else had and she was left cold once again, shivering and hugging her stomach.

"He's dying." She hated that she could hear the weight of every word, how hard it was hitting him. Lit by the dull light of the vinegar lamp, his face was twisted up in pain, wet with tears. "Because of _you_ ," he breathed, barely audible.

And that was it, the very bottom of it all, the final step they were taking in their friendship together. She'd killed Matt, just like she'd wanted to, it had just taken her a little bit longer than she thought to get to it. Karen started gnawing on her lip, getting to her feet, leaving the lamp on as she went and sat back down on the couch.

She had no clue what time it was. All she could hear was Matt's breathing and Foggy's dead silence, a room devoid of the things she'd gotten too attached to, and, sitting on her couch, she made her decision. It was her fault, really. She shouldn't have let herself get so used to it, to become so reliant on it, their silly familial relationship that wouldn't have ever worked, because Foggy and Matt were brothers, and she was just a roommate. An _interloper._

Time passed as slowly as she thought anything could, and Foggy laid himself back down, and Matt fell back asleep sitting up on the futon. It was a long time before she saw the morning's frail light playing at the edges of the tarped windows. Matt's breathing was growing weaker and weaker.

She couldn't watch him die. She was a coward, and she accepted that, but she couldn't watch Foggy glare at her, listen to his cold silences whenever she tried to talk to him, stare at the brick wall that he kept throwing up between them instead of responding to anything she did.

No. She'd worn out her welcome and tarnished her place in their lives too much for her to ever be able to reclaim it, so she wasn't even going to try.

Instead of making coffee, a task that she'd grown so surprisingly fond of, she started gathering things up. Her clothes, a few of her books. Gun parts. The break-action shotgun. Her sketchbook of spotlight wiring and biofuel engine conversion. She didn't own a lot of things.

As she passed to and fro through the dimly lit living room, Foggy roused, wincing, stared at her for a long moment, then sighed and rolled over until his back was to her. She wasn't surprised. Matt shifted awake, eyes glazed with fever, his skin visibly dry and red even from across the room. His eyes rolled around and he lifted his head slowly, but lost his strength halfway through the motion and let it rest back on the futon.

Karen eventually looked away from them, grabbing her extra shoes and some tools from the storage room and stuffing them in her backpack. It wasn't much, but she only had to get to Yonkers. She'd been there before. They'd remember her—well, they'd remember _Paige._

The thought of going back to that, to running on autopilot and casting all that she was to the wayside made her stomach turn. But she'd done it before and she could do it again. It was safe. She had to be safe. So did Matt and Foggy.

As she zipped up her backpack, Matt shifted, turning his head weakly in her direction. It was impossible to tell if he was even awake. He was pretty in and out of it, and God, she'd just watched Foggy go through the same fucking thing. Hell if she was going to do it again.

Especially if they didn't want her there.

Karen hitched her backpack up on her shoulders and sighed before grabbing the break-action shotgun from where she'd left it, on the kitchen counter. The nine-millimeter was still on the coffee table—Matt had been the one to scavenge it, so they'd be the ones to keep it. It seemed fair, even when nothing else did.

She paused at the door to the stairs, blinking at the morning light cutting through the dust she'd stirred up as she moved. Her teeth worried at her still-scabbed bottom lip, and her fingers worried against the chain still hanging from her neck. Karen reached into her shirt to grab it and pull it off over her head, balling the chain up with the whistle as she crossed back into the living room and hovered at the coffee table.

Matt turned his face in her direction. Foggy ignored her. Nobody said anything.

Karen chewed harder on her lip and tasted blood. There was something stinging at the corners of her eyes that she tried not to notice. She twisted the chain a few times between her thumb and forefinger, then shifted on her feet and dropped it to the table. It made such a loud noise when it landed, almost echoing in the silence that was stagnating between the three of them.

Matt's head twitched and his eyebrows creased. Foggy didn't budge.

She opened her mouth to say something, but there was nothing in to be found, no words or sounds or anything. Just emptiness. She couldn't even apologize. She'd apologized too much already, and it was all falling on deaf ears anyway.

The floor creaked under her feet as she made her way back to the stairs. She wasn't even halfway down them when she heard movement behind her, a staggering series of steps and harsh, labored breathing. No, she wasn't going to stop, she wasn't going to listen, she didn't want to be here anymore, and she sure as hell didn't have to if she didn't want to.

Foggy had taught her that, and she couldn't even thank him for it.

Then there was Matt's voice, trailing down the stairs, roughened by the infection rampaging through his chest instead of his viral growl. "Karen. Karen." Her name was one word again, at least, and God, how was he even _walking_ , but—

It didn't matter. Tracking his progress wasn't something she had to do anymore. Especially if there was no fucking point. Karen ignored him and kept moving. Only a few more stairs, and the garage door, and then the truck, and she'd be gone. Out of their orbit. Free.

Karen bit hard on her tongue. She didn't feel free at all. She felt more trapped than ever, even with the wide open world a few feet away.

"K-Karen," Matt was saying, or trying to say, struggling to form words in his head and force them through the things that were slowly killing him. "Karen. Karen. Please, Karen, Karen."

No. She wasn't listening. She wasn't turning back.

There was a thumping noise, a low, pained yowl, and a series of horrible coughs, the same ones that she'd been listening to all night. Scratching, like worn fingernails from an uncontrollably shaking hand on a doorframe. She wasn't listening.

"Karen. Karen. _Karen!"_

She was only a few steps from the garage floor. Not listening, not looking, not turning back, she could see the truck and she was going to climb in and turn it on and never come back to Brooklyn again, she'd never be in danger or putting them in danger, she'd be alone, and—

"Not go," came Matt's wet voice, broken irreparably. Not even Foggy could put him back together. "Karen, not go, not go."

Almost at the last step.

"Please. Please. Karen, please, not, please."

He was begging. Matt was begging for her to stay. She didn't slow down, and nearly reached up to baffle her own ears with her fingers so she wouldn't have to hear anymore. He was making strange noises, weak animal wailing that was mired in the infection. There was a low grunt—surprise—and another thud.

Of course she swung her head around to look, on a reflex that she couldn't douse, because somedays, Matt's feet were not so trustworthy, and he'd trip on things he'd normally avoid, and Foggy was always afraid he'd fall down the stairs, and she'd scoffed so many times about it, but she had to look, she had to make sure, and she couldn't even pin down in her head why it was so important anymore. Karen stopped at the last stair as she turned to see, and yes, damn it, he was at the doorway clutching onto the stair railing because his useless fucking body couldn't be trusted to keep him on the top fucking floor.

Karen was halfway up them before she could stop herself, and that was reflex, too, especially when she set the shotgun aside to reach for him, to help him up.

And Matt's reflexes took over for him, too, and he gasped and jerked back from her, shying away, an animal avoiding violence. She didn't get anywhere close to touching him, and recoiled just as he had, although for the opposite reason.

She couldn't believe she could muster up the strength to speak at all, but she did, her voice nearly as weak as his. "This is why I'm leaving, Matt," she murmured.

It only took a split-second for his face to crumple, for him to shake his head and attempt an apology for a thing that neither of them could control. "No," he whined. "No. I did... did not... no, Karen—"

"Bye, Matt."

She turned and descended the stairs, and that time, she didn't pause or slow down. Matt's tiny, breathy wails were echoing through the garage; they sounded so loud, like he was right next to her. The garage door was still crooked, but she hauled it up a few feet, slipped underneath it, and shut it behind her. Outside, it was silent, and for the first time in weeks, there was sunlight peeking through the clouds, lighting her way, and God, she couldn't even pause to appreciate it.

Karen climbed into the truck, blinked the tears and the dust out of her eyes, and stuck the keys in the ignition. The engine grumbled to life and she started down the road, never looking back, driving out of Brooklyn, out of Matt's territory, to somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Carry your world, and all your hurt._  
>  Coldplay


	29. ever the same (part one)

Foggy stared at the edge of the coffee table and tried not to focus on the noises coming from the kitchen, which made him focus on his leg instead, and that was just as bad. It _hurt_ , like nothing else ever had before, and he was very sure he could feel his toes curling even though they weren't there anymore. He kept letting his hand drift down, just to make sure, but the empty space was still there; it wouldn't ever be filled again.

He didn't remember much. Everything between the tunnel and the stagnant-smelling apartment was a bubbling swirl, a sibylline smear of brown and green and grey, each second blurred into the next. It was impossible to pull any of them apart, to isolate any singular moment. All he really remembered were the sensations: heat blistering under his skin, an awful knife-like chill digging into his organs, and the endless fucking pain that traveled from some point below his knee, rolled through his hip, and shot up his spine to lodge itself into his brain.

If he would have been capable of coherent thought, he probably would have been begging to die, but all he had were scraps, and he'd held onto them too tightly; they disintegrated in his hands and he was left with nothing at all.

When he'd opened his eyes yesterday and found himself blinking at a dented and well-worn coffee table, his immediate thought was that he'd died. Strange, that Heaven was a tiny goddamn apartment in Brooklyn. Stranger still that he hadn't gone straight to Hell. Really, he should have. At least it'd be warmer than fucking New York City.

Nothing was really warmer than the memories hovering on the edge of his mind, though, the ones he couldn't decipher. There was a voice, or an echo of a voice, but he couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman, it was so muddled. He could guess, though, because there weren't really any other possibilities: Karen, with the knife and the saw.

And Matt. Matt. His stumbling voice and too-cold fingers drifting as ghosts in Foggy's head, and now, his low noises from the kitchen, distorted as they echoed down the stairs, the voice of an animal, wounded and afraid. The only thing more painful to hear was Matt's irregular breathing and the rattle of the infection in his chest, for once outclassing the virus in his brain.

His inarticulate wailing only made Foggy _angrier_ , but he didn't even know who to point the anger at. Karen for leaving, Matt for coming back, himself for all the ways he'd fucked up. It just became an uncomfortable sensation, like he was warm from fever, even though he knew his fever had broken in the night while Matt's had started to climb. Foggy didn't even know how Matt had managed to get to his feet to go after Karen.

God, Karen. Foggy couldn't hear the truck anymore—she was long gone. He wanted to be glad, to feel relief, to know that Matt was safer without her there, but all he felt was a vague hollowness, like she'd dug everything out of him and taken it all with her. His mind chased itself around and around, trying to blame someone, anyone else, but the only conclusion he ever came to was _nobody_ and _everybody_ and he couldn't get his thoughts straight.

There was a voice in the back of his head, but it wasn't his. It yelled, screamed for him to understand, that it wasn't Karen's fault, that none of it was anyone's fault, but he shoved it back, smothered it in the churning black tar at the back of his head, drowned it in the screams of a woman with a broken back and the sight of teeth snapping in his face and _Not yours not yours mine mine mine_.

Foggy tried to push his face into the damp mattress; the smell of death and rot and the river and mercury flooded his nose and he had to turn his face up to stop from gagging. He didn't want to vomit out the medication that they were fast running out of.

God, it hurt. His skin felt like it had shrunk; it was too cold, bound too tightly around his bones. There was the slow drumming of his heartbeat in his skull. He let a long breath rattle out of his chest, and tried to swallow the dryness in his throat so he could talk.

It didn't work and his voice came out with a parched weakness. "Matt."

The soft sounds grew softer, the animal side of Matt breaking off from its wail so the human side could attempt to communicate past it. Attempt was a good word. He made a weird gurgling noise, something Foggy couldn't pin down; a growl merged into a cough and glued together with a whimper. No words, only instinctive sounds.

"Matt," Foggy repeated. He probably should have been trying to sit up. He didn't want to sit up. He didn't want to do anything. His voice was moving out of his throat anyway. "Come here."

Matt's low wail tried coming back, but the cough got there first, low and wet and so, _so_ loud. He gasped for air between them, breaths shrilly whistling. It sounded like he was being fucking stabbed over and over. After a minute he started gagging and retching, like his body was trying to expel everything inside of it, the infection, the virus, and the awful feelings that he couldn't decipher.

Foggy felt his heartbeat picking up, and he knew it was worry and fear, but his limbs didn't want to move, didn't want to bring him to the kitchen to help. Lifting his head from the futon mattress took all that was in him, but he couldn't see Matt around the kitchen doorway.

He heard Matt groan, pained and confused, then heard something wet hit the kitchen floor. Probably vomit, probably all the water and medication that Foggy had managed to coax into him. A waste. Then Matt was coughing again, whimpering again, dying again.

Foggy stared at the coffee table for a long moment, then tried to get himself sitting up. He was dizzy _(hypovolemia)_ and weak _(exhaustion, dehydration, malnutrition)_ and could feel irrational anger thrumming in his chest alongside his drumming heart _(Karen, Karen, Karen, Karen)._ Foggy grasped at the futon mattress with one hand, then grabbed the lifted backrest, tugging himself into a sitting position. All he wanted to do afterward was lie right back down again, go to sleep, never wake up.

There was a clattering noise, a thumping sound, a gargled word that started with 'F' and ended with agony. All Foggy could imagine was Matt falling down the stairs, Matt breaking his neck, Matt collapsing dead on the kitchen floor. The images blared neon in his mind and he let them stay, used them for fuel to get his useless body all the way up from the futon.

"Matt," he said again. His voice cracked through his dry throat. "Matty."

When Foggy got no answer, he dragged himself clumsily along the mattress toward the kitchen. His leg—half-leg—flared with pain, more of those sharp red-hot stabbing agonies that buried themselves in his hip and all the way up his spine, _pop pop pop pop pop_. He ignored them and kept moving.

"Buddy."

Matt had fallen silent; the whole apartment went quiet.

"Say something, Matt. Please."

Foggy only heard the noise of the wind snapping the tarps at the windows and rattling the garage door downstairs. He thought he could hear those awful gasps for air, but they sounded so much like everything else that he couldn't pull the sounds apart. His leg howled in the back of his head and roared every time he pulled at the remains of his severed muscles. All he could do was keep trying to ignore it.

At the edge of the futon, he hesitated, then slowly reached out and braced one hand on the coffee table and the other on the mattress, moving himself down to the floor. The remainder of his leg bumped along the carpet and his whole body froze as the pain roared, thrashed like a wild thing trapped inside of him. He was distantly aware of the sharp whine that came from his throat, but mostly all he could focus on was the pain.

It felt like someone was stomping on his foot, the one the infection had taken from him. His heartbeat pounded in time with it, and he could feel his toes snapping, breaking, but they weren't even there, he was staring at the blank space, and they _weren't there,_ why did they _hurt so fucking much?_

Foggy wasn't sure how much time he wasted sitting on the floor waiting for the pain to pass, continually wiping the tears off of his face so they wouldn't irritate the rain burns, and he thought maybe he should have been counting his heartbeats in order to find out. There still wasn't any noise coming from the kitchen, nothing he could hear past the wind outside. He didn't waste any more time calling out for Matt, just grit his teeth and started moving again, placing his hands flat on the mildewed carpet and scooting himself forward.

There wasn't much space between him and the kitchen but it still felt like a mile, shifting himself forward weakly, heart thudding in dread and terror. Everything felt so heavy.

"Don't be dead, Matt," Foggy started breathing as he got to the kitchen door. "Don't be fucking dead. Please don't be dead."

He shoved the door open with his elbow, and Matt was curled up next to the door to the stairs. Foggy couldn't sit still long enough to see if Matt's chest was moving; he scrambled, dragged himself forward as fast as he could, not caring about his ruined leg. He'd gladly give up the other one to keep Matt safe and alive. He'd give up anything. Everything.

"Matty," he breathed, "Matty, Matty."

Foggy didn't want to reach forward and touch Matt's cold skin, to search for a pulse that might not be there, but he did anyway, and flinched as his fingers touched Matt's throat. He was warm. Actually warm. Still not as warm as Foggy, but his skin didn't hold its usual chill. A fever.

A fever, and underneath the skin, his heartbeat, a trapped bird fluttering beneath Foggy's fingertips. He pushed out a breath and ignored how it clouded up in the freezing air coming up from the garage. Gently, he cradled Matt's head, tugged him a little closer. There was a puddle of foamy vomit in the doorway to the stairs, and he could see the faint glimpses of color in it—the antibiotic capsules.

 _Well, that's awesome_ , he thought, deliriously, wiping away the mess around Matt's lips. Matt jerked and pawed at him, dragging in a breath. It didn't whistle, probably because he'd just coughed out what it was whistling around. That was good. His color still wasn't. His temperature wasn't.

Foggy stared into the shadows of the apartment, shifting his intact leg carefully so he could prop Matt up against it. The other one still howled, clawed at his mind, drowning out nearly everything else. Matt kept pulling in one weak gasp after another, clinging desperately to consciousness, to his fucked and mangled life, his eyes glazed over, gaze fixed.

And Foggy sat there, in the dark, listening to it, glaring at the corner of the kitchen until the image blurred and swayed because he was crying again, tears flooding his eyes, spilling over, coasting through the rain burns on his face. The crying wasn't even from pain, that time. It was something else entirely, a nameless thing rising from the dark tar in the back of his head, hissing its blame at him over and over and over.

You did this. You did this. You did this. She's gone because of you.

Matt twisted suddenly, but he was too weak to even worm out of Foggy's grasp. Pain crashed into his expression and he coughed, then retched, and Foggy finally saw why. Whatever Matt was getting out of his chest was slimy and black, tinged with yellow and red, and it smelled like rot and the river. It smelled like Matt was already dead and all this gasping and coughing was just a formality.

"God, you need to sit up," he breathed, heaving Matt awkwardly into an upright position and resting him against the kitchen wall, careful not to touch or think too hard about the knife wound on his shoulder. Matt still didn't weigh fucking anything. He blinked slowly at the floor, half-conscious, head twitching sluggishly, his face colorless.

Foggy rubbed a thumb along the stark line of Matt's collarbone. "Matt," he said, because, for once in his fucking life, he had no idea what the fuck else to say to him. Apologizing was worthless, but Foggy mumbled it out anyway, "I'm sorry."

"Fog," Matt managed, and vomited again, making sharp fractured whines as his spasming gut messed with his broken ribs. What came out of him was mostly a foamy mess, a swirling mix of yellow and black and brown. No food. Just acid and bile and rot. And blood, now, a tiny ribbon of it, but an entire gallon would have been just as alarming.

Foggy pressed closer, not caring about the puddle on the floor. He'd swim in it to keep Matt afloat. "Just breathe," he said, reaching out and pressing the back of his hand to Matt's forehead. Lukewarm. Too warm for a feral. "Breathe for me. That's all you need to do."

Matt was actually sweating, even in the freezing air of the apartment, eyes shutting as he pushed desperately back into the scant physical contact Foggy was giving him. His throat bobbed as he swallowed repeatedly, bile and drool and his quiet, muffled whimpers of fear and pain.

Foggy felt the heat in the corners of his eyes and ignored it. "Matt." He pushed his fingers through the other man's hair, reached out with both hands to brace his thumbs on Matt's jaw, keeping him upright. "...You aren't allowed to die on me, okay?"

Matt tried to focus, but everything seemed so heavy for him, and all he could do was grumble and struggle to spit out the correct syllables. "...Am. Am d-d—"

Foggy cut him off, too scared to hear the words coming out of that trembling body. "No, you're not. You're not gonna die."

He brought in more air; his voice came out slowly, slurred and garbled. "You say. Die. Dying." He lifted his shivering hand—more like seizuring, God, the tremor had never been so bad—and dragged his thumb along his own chest. "Me." He gestured weakly to nothing but the dust around them. "Karen."

" _Karen?_ " Anger lashed through him, sudden and forceful, and Foggy would have clenched his fists if his hands weren't the only thing stopping Matt from collapsing. "What about Karen?"

"You... tell Karen." He touched his chest again. "Dying."

Foggy shook his head so hard he felt the bones in his neck pop. "No. No. I was—that—that wasn't true. I was mad. I was just mad."

Matt's eyelids fluttered; his eyes remained fixed on some distant, unreachable point. "You lie."

"You're not going to die. You hear me? You're not."

Matt listened to Foggy's voice, his words and his heart, then huffed out a sigh. Halfway out of his lips it turned into a coughing fit. He leaned his head back on the wall as he rode it out, Foggy keeping him upright. More black gunk. It smelled worse than the Hudson now.

"Hurt," Matt breathed, choking on a sob, unable to even say the whole word. He was trying to hug his side and support his ribs, but the movement of his shaking hand kept pouring into the other; his face was a mess of tears and bruises, harsh winces and brackish mucus. "Fog."

"I'm right here."

Matt dragged the back of his shaking hand across his mouth, expression all twisted up, taking short, snorting gasps through his nose. To Foggy, it sounded like something he'd hear in an animal right before it died. He'd heard it before, roadkill in a ditch when he visited his extended family out in the country. All reflex and instinct. Death throes.

Foggy dragged himself forward; they were nearly embracing but it still wasn't close enough. "Deep breaths, Matt."

He tried, God did he try, but his expression crumbled more and more as his chest expanded, his broken ribs a dam that he couldn't batter through. Matt shook his head, sobbing openly now, and even those were fractured and halting. There was so much terror on his face that it was spilling over, filling the kitchen, tainting everything around him.

"Matt, no. Deeper," he ordered, voice shaking, reaching out to spread a hand across Matt's chest. "Like me. What I do, you do, okay?" Foggy caught Matt's shaking hand and guided it to his own chest before taking as deep a breath as he could. It felt like cheating, it felt so fucking unfair. "Like this."

"Hhh—hu— _hurt_ —"

"Don't talk. Just breathe."

Matt whined, tossed his head, an animal yanking at the snare it'd been captured in, but he couldn't get free. He never would. His eyes flicked around in steadily-rising panic as the pain ebbed and flowed alongside his respirations.

"Like me, Matty, like me." Foggy wasn't sure how Matt wasn't being deafened by his heartbeat, rapid and fear-filled, thrumming heavy in his own ears; how could Matt hear anything beyond it? "You need to listen to me."

No answer; Matt just kept gasping, hands dropping to his sides like they'd become ten times heavier. There was sharp pain in Foggy's eyes, a dryness in his throat. Matt was about to die. He was about to die right there in Foggy's hands, in the broken kitchen of a broken apartment, pale and terrified and breathless.

The snorting, jerky inhales were slowing down, and Foggy couldn't tell if it was because Matt's body was losing its fight against the infection or if Matt was legitimately trying to take deeper breaths. He grabbed Matt's head again with both hands, trying to ignore how he twitched and snuffled and grunted airily like he'd been woken up from a doze.

"Matt, pay attention," Foggy said, digging his fingers into the scruff on Matt's neck, the rough patches of skin from being burned by the rain. "Matty." He got no response, so he dug his fingernails in harder, hearing his voice twist and crack. "Please, Matt. Please. Don't do this. Please don't fucking do this to me."

He was dying. His eyes were going still and fixed. He was dying.

Foggy was nearly screaming but he couldn't even feel the air leaving his throat. "No, no, no, no, please don't, please don't go, Matt, Matty. Don't go away. Please don't go away, don't go, don't go, don't go." He moved in as close as he could, chests nearly touching, resting their foreheads together, Matt's lukewarm skin pressed against his own. He was babbling, babbling like a brain-damaged feral trying to speak past panic and pain, crying like his best friend in frustration and fear. "Don't go away, Matt, don't go away, please, Matt, please don't."

Matt was making awful rattling noises in his chest, either a growl or his stolen breaths trying to batter their way past the blackened infection. He slumped against Foggy's hold, muscles loose, still gasping. His eyes slid to the right, slowly, and then to the left, even more slowly. It was a good sign; it had to be a good sign, because it meant Matt was still awake, still alive.

"Hey buddy, hey." Foggy clutched desperately at him, shaking him, trying to get his attention. "Can you hear me? Matty?"

"Mgh."

Okay, it wasn't a word, or a growl, or a grunt, but it was something. It was an attempt. Matt was hearing Foggy's voice and responding, just like the first time in the Park, the tiny, shivering feral dying of an infected wound. Foggy kept his hands on Matt's jaw, thumbs gently brushing, knowing he was the only thing stopping Matt from collapsing. It was not a struggle to keep him upright, he weighed so little.

"I've got you," he said, pushing one thumb in circles along a patchy beard and feeling Matt reflexively tilt his head in that direction. "Just breathe. Breathe."

He did as asked, like always, even though it hurt. After a moment, Matt's eyes went still; Foggy hissed and shook him again, keeping him awake. "Don't you fall asleep, you bastard. Stay awake with me, okay?"

"M'tie," Matt gurgled, then swallowed a few times. "...Tie."

"Tired," Foggy corrected, and he didn't even know why he was still trying to put Matt's head back together when his body was crumbling apart in his hands. "I know you're tired, buddy," he mumbled, blinking more tears out of his eyes. "But you can't sleep, okay? I need you to stay awake."

His gurgling turned into a whine that was trying really, _really_ hard to become the annoyed grumble Matt would always spit out when he was placed under house arrest to let a wound heal. Barely conscious and still bitching, Jesus. Matt winced, raising his good hand and brushing his fingertips clumsily on the underside of one of Foggy's arms.

"...'M wake," Matt breathed. "Foggy, no..." he blinked a few times and fell silent.

Foggy waited, and waited, but once Matt's eyes tried to flutter shut again he knew his friend had lost his train of thought. "No what, Matt?"

He winced as his chest took in a deeper breath. It looked like reflex. His eyes roved around lazily. "Fog." His fingers danced along Foggy's sleeve and held on laxly. "You sc... sc... mm." Matt shifted, finally moving under his own power, leaning against Foggy's arms until Foggy relaxed them, then kept going to push their foreheads together again. "You sca... Fog. Fog, sc- _scared_ ," he said, voice raising as he finally got the word out of his mouth.

"Of course I'm scared, you asshole." He could hear the high, hysterical tone in his own voice. "I'm worried."

"I m—I..." Matt didn't finish, and for a few seconds he was either rolling his eyes, or seeking a word far, far back in his head. Foggy never got to find out what it was, because Matt's fingers dropped from his arm and he slumped again, listless, and all Foggy could do was lean slightly back to catch him.

"No, no, no, Matt. _Matt_." Foggy shook him, tried to push him back upright, but Matt's fight was over; he'd lost. He ended up curled in Foggy's arms, gasping in the muggy air against Foggy's collarbone. Still breathing. That's all that mattered. That he kept breathing. He was just sick. Pneumonia, chest infection, chronic fatigue, he was just sleeping, Matt was only sleeping, and he'd wake up, he'd wake up.

But they were still in the goddamn kitchen, tangled together in the freezing air. Matt was shivering despite the warmth of his skin, his forehead pressed against Foggy's neck. He was almost as warm as Foggy, and that wasn't good, but they'd—

Foggy could fix it. He had to fix it.

"All right, bud, all right," he mumbled, shifting Matt carefully. "I need to... we need our stuff from the..." Foggy trailed off. Matt couldn't hear him. It took him only a few seconds to realize he didn't care. "I need to get the supplies," he whispered, supporting Matt's head as he eased him to the stained, freezing floor of the kitchen. "I'll be right back," he said, and pushed his fingers once through Matt's hair before moving.

It took a long time. Foggy tried not to think about how he looked, dragging himself around, carefully keeping the half-leg up in the air so he wouldn't bang it on something. The pain was immense, but the fear of losing Matt was ten times worse. He gathered up the blankets from the futon first, scrabbling at the mattress to pull himself up to his feet. Foot.

Hopping was a bad idea, he realized almost instantly, as he felt the blood rush and pool at the stump. The thrumming pain intensified; instead of a taut guitar string, it was an over-tuned piano, dozens of little wires wound up too tightly and playing a high, howling cacophany in the back of his head. His nerves stole his balance from him and he toppled into an awkward sitting position on the futon mattress.

Foggy felt his voice more than he heard it, dozens of repeated little utterances, " _Ow fuck ow fuck ow fuck fuck fuck_ ," and he had to lean his head back for a long few minutes, letting the tears spill out of his eyes and create chilled trails down his face. There was somebody stepping on his foot again, crushing each toe in sequence, and he swore he could feel his toenails splinter and tear apart.

Breathing hard, he kept himself as still as possible, terrified that if he moved his leg, someone would set his nonexistent foot on fire. It hurt almost as much as it had before Karen had ripped it off of him, and the tears came faster at the fucking injustice of it all. Why had he fucking jumped off of that train? Why had he allowed Matt to take them into the subway?

  
Why had he lived beyond the fire?

His answer came from the kitchen, a series of coughs, wet and harsh, a faint whine. "Yeah, buddy, I'm coming," Foggy said, then shifted his leg with an experimental slowness, testing the waters.

The water turned boiling-hot and leapt all the way up to his fucking heart. He was crying out again, but he didn't even know what words he was saying, just that they were furious and sharp and probably not fit for children. Karen's name was in there, too, and he tossed his blame at her, because he had nowhere else to put it. It didn't matter, she'd never hear it, she'd never come back, and it was... it was...

It was his fault. It was all his fault.

There were new words, now, tumbling heedlessly out of his mouth, and it took a half-dozen repetitions before he figured out what they were. There was fire crawling up his leg. His tongue felt like someone else's.

"I'm sorry, Matt, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm _sorry_."

That was it, that was his loop. Matt had his, and now Foggy did, too. He circled it over and over and over, a skipping CD, a broken feral with a broken brain, locking into it and repeating it until it was as familiar as his own pulse, and the words didn't make sense anymore, they were just another sequence of sounds like the coughing in the kitchen and the sobs spilling out of his chest.

And then there was a new word; he'd been saying the others for so long that it felt like it was a foreign language:

"Karen. Karen. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Karen, I'm sorry."

Foggy didn't get an answer from anyone. In the kitchen, Matt coughed a few more times, and his breaths rattled through the cold air, and Foggy sat and waited for the pain to stop, waited for it all to stop, because he didn't want to do it anymore, he didn't want to be here, he just wanted it to be over, but it just kept going.

God, he did not want to get up. Blinking the tears out of his eyes for the thousandth time, he stared at the coffee table, the vinegar lamp. Its light was nothing but a dying ember, faint and near-useless, but in its halo he could see the metal curve of the pistol, the nine-millimeter Matt had dug out of the dust ages ago.

It hurt, it fucking hurt, but Foggy levered himself up, leaning his hands on the edge of the mattress to keep himself upright. He reached out with a clumsy hand and hooked a finger around the trigger guard, pulling it across the table toward him. It was so heavy when he picked it up, and it only got heavier when he pulled the slide back. A round gleamed up at him from the chamber, loaded.

He let the slide move back into its default position, and fuck, there were the tears again, as strong as they'd been a few minutes ago, like he'd never cried before in his life and was making up for all of the lost time. His eyes hurt, but God, everything hurt. Foggy shifted, placing the pistol next to him as he tried to keep himself sitting up straight. His toes were ground down to meal, and now his tendons were on fire, lines of heat crawling up toward his knee.

Foggy stared at the gun, wondering if it would hurt. How fast it would be. If he'd even be brave enough to do it. There wasn't a scrap of bravery in his body; he was a coward, born and raised, and nothing would change that. He'd ran in the tunnel from Karen, fled in the truck from the shelter, and now he had the chance to do it again. It hadn't worked before and it fucking sure wasn't going to save him now.

His sobbing started up, but unfortunately, the sounds from the kitchen started up, too, and they hit him like a sledgehammer; a cough and a gag, and the gurgling noise of vomiting. More vomiting. What was even inside of Matt to vomit up?

"Just a second, Matty," he said, voice breaking apart, and gathered up the duffel, and the pistol, and the lamp and the blankets. Everything useful he dumped into the bag; the blankets he draped over his shoulders. He obviously couldn't get Matt back to the warmth of the futon, so Foggy would just take the warmth to him.

It was something. Something he could focus on, something he could place at the end of the tunnel that was his vision, to distract him from the gleam of the pistol.

Dragging himself to the kitchen felt the same as the last time, except he didn't bang his worthless stump on the floor. Thank God, because he probably would have passed out, and a lot of use he'd be if he did that. Not that he was much use anyway.

Matt was right where Foggy had left him, both hands on the floor as he struggled weakly to get up and away from a foamy puddle beneath his chin. Yellow and black. No pills. No food. Another streak of blood. Foggy grabbed a handful of his hoodie, tugging him away from the puke so he wouldn't aspirate it and drown himself. He couldn't even pick himself up on his own anymore.

"I got you, buddy, I got you," Foggy whispered, pulling the blankets off his shoulders.

His leg was screaming, and once he had Matt in the recovery position, he stopped in order to wait for the pain to fade. Jaw clenching, he bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. He was breathing a bit like Matt, sharp gasps through his nose, mouth pressed tightly shut. The fire had moved from his tendons to his veins, and his bones were disintegrating.

More tears and sobbing, because that was all Foggy had left in him. The pain in his leg was only compounding on top of the pain spilling over from Matt, but Matt hurt the most. Matt hurt more than anything else ever had or would. He tugged Matt closer and draped one of the blankets over him, leaning against the kitchen wall to keep him halfway in his lap.

Foggy rested there a while, staring at Matt's shaking hand, waiting for it go still. That would be his sign, he knew. He felt cheated by the fact that the virus wasn't what was going to kill Matt after all. Foggy wondered how long he would have lived. How much more time he might have been blessed with.

Foggy pushed his fingers through Matt's hair, feeling the sweat, the distant sting of the rain's residue as it caught on his knuckles. Matt gasped and gasped, the rhythm like clockwork, the underlying rattle growing louder and louder. There were low whines starting to come up, too, and Foggy wished, greedily, that Matt would have retained his fearlessness toward death that he'd had in his old life.

No, it was gone, replaced by animal panic. Matt knew what was happening and he was fighting it, fighting with all he had left in him, but it wasn't enough this time. It was barely enough the first time. He whimpered, tossed himself weakly around, gasped against Foggy's leg and scratched at the floor with his good hand.

Foggy swallowed what felt like a glacier in the back of his throat and tugged Matt up into his lap, pulling him close, sheltering his friend with both arms as tightly as he could. Matt's face was pressed up against his neck, and he could feel the warmth there. Not blood, not blood.

"I'm here," Foggy whispered, and the warmth on his face wasn't blood, either. He tilted his head, pressed his lips against Matt's temple and breathed out the words like a prayer, like a confession. "I'm here. You're not alone." And that was the miracle, that was what made everything else worth it—Matt wasn't dying by himself, scared and cold in the mud like all the ferals that had come before him.

Matt was shivering, his head twitching with irregular jerks, and Foggy tugged him in closer and tighter, trying to share the warmth. Foggy couldn't feel how uncomfortable it was, how his leg was throbbing like a jackhammer alongside his racing heart, how wet and warm his cheeks had become. It fell away to the sensation of the shaking body in his arms, waiting for it to go silent and still.

"Shh-shh-shh," he hushed as Matt let out a soft, gargling whine. "Don't be scared." The last thing he wanted was for Matt's last moments to be filled with fear. He deserved to be warm and wanted. Everything he'd done, everything he'd lived through, and it came down to broken ribs and a chest infection; no glory or heroics. He'd deserved so much more than that.

Matt's good hand shivered along Foggy's collarbone, then dragged down and clutched a frail handful of stained shirt. He tried to say something, but it was all tangled up in the infection and the virus, and he got out only a couple of nonsensical syllables before he gave up.

"I know, Matty."

He tried again, because he always tried, he never fucking stopped trying no matter what was standing in his way or weighing him down. Foggy felt him swallowing, trying to clear his throat, swallowing again, tossing his tongue around in his mouth. A low noise came out, an attempt at something starting with 'sc'.

'Scared', probably. Definitely.

"Don't be scared, Matt. I'm here."

Matt shuddered hard, and Foggy thought immediately that it was the last thing Matt would do, that in a few minutes he was going to be holding a corpse, a shell, and Matt would be gone. A second death, except this one would be permanent. Only a man like Matt would be able to die twice, damn it.

"Shh, shh," Foggy murmured, pressing his lips to Matt's temple again.

"Sc—" Matt started again, then thrashed a little, and Foggy thought all the way back in the clinical half of his brain that he was probably convulsing, but instead Matt made a grumbling noise and then coughed four or five times. With a grunt and a disgusted noise, he spat out a massive chunk of something black and slick that splattered hot and runny onto Foggy's shirt and arm.

For a split-second, Foggy almost thought that it was part of an organ, that the river had disintegrated Matt from the inside out, just like his nonexistent foot, but then he looked at it. At the same time, Matt took a deeper breath and let it out as a shivering groan. There was relief in the noise and it was contagious because Foggy felt it too, and more warmth spilled out of his eyes.

It smelled horrible, what Matt had coughed out—the Hudson three-fold, worse than any alien or subway tunnel ever would be. Foggy brought it out into the half-light of the kitchen, and it was the same stuff he'd coughed up earlier, just larger, thicker. Matt leaned hard against Foggy's neck, dragging in more breaths, deeper and deeper because he'd expelled what was restricting them.

"'S cold," Matt mumbled against Foggy's skin, it wasn't 'scared', and Foggy could have sobbed for hours simply about that. Matt repeated himself, clearer, to be sure he could be understood. "Cold."

"You're cold?"

Matt grunted. "Yes," he said, and it had a beautiful undercurrent that Foggy couldn't hear but his mind could interpret—it was dull irritation that Matt had to clarify himself. Something that wasn't pain or fear. Foggy's eyes were burning. "Cold."

"Yeah, okay," he whispered, blinking in surprise, then drew the blanket up over Matt's shoulders, tucking it in along his armpits. "Buddy, I thought you... I thought..." he trailed off, and couldn't finish, because saying it out loud would make it real and every second he had with Matt already made him feel like he'd won the lottery. "It... it's okay, bud. Is that any better?"

Matt's gasping started rattling again as the infection pressed back in. "Cold," he said again, clearly unable to find anything else. He shifted about, and it felt like thrashing, convulsing, and Foggy realized that Matt was just disoriented, he was sick, his equilibrium was off and his sense of smell deadened and he was fucking feral, all his movements were jerky and rough and the illness was only making it more obvious.

Foggy blinked hard, trying to blink back the heat in his eyes, but he lost his fight, and started sobbing. He tried to be quiet about it, to hide it from Matt.

Matt knew immediately and gripped harder to Foggy's shirt, tilting his head to increase the amount of contact between them with a rumbling, questioning noise that slowly shaped itself into a word. "Foggy."

"Yeah, I know, I know," he said, and his voice was strangled and sharp. He clutched Matt tighter, and wished he could crush the stinking bastard against his chest without hurting him, bury him inside where he'd be safe no matter what happened. "I can't... it..." he fumbled over the words, filled in the silences between them with crying.

Matt frowned; Foggy could feel it against his neck along with the warmth of tears. Of course Matt was crying, too, that was all it took most times—for someone else to be upset within his proximity. "Foggy," he mumbled again, his breathing falling back into the harsh dry gasping. "Fo—"

"Don't leave me," he blurted, cutting Matt off because it was all tumbling out of him, too warm and too painful like poison out of his gut. "Don't leave me, Matt, please don't leave me. I can't do this without you, I can't—I can't—" he couldn't be alone, and that was the bottom of it. He couldn't be alone just like Matt couldn't be alone, just like Karen couldn't be alone, even though Karen was gone now, and it was his fault. She didn't deserve it. He wanted her back. He needed her back.

Why was he such a fucking screw-up?

Matt interrupted his thoughts. "Foggy, okay," he said softly. "You... you know. Not go away."

"Don't go away, okay?"

"Won't." His gasping became uneven and he coughed again, the horrible-sounding wet hacking that culminated with more of the river-stink dampening Foggy's shirt, but it was followed by a deeper breath, an easier breath, just like the last one. Then Matt grumbled and corrected himself. " _I_ won't."

And the fact that Matt was coherent enough to fix his speech, to do what Foggy had taught him to do, hurt so fucking much that Foggy couldn't even talk anymore. He just sobbed against Matt's temple and pulled him closer, so the world couldn't take Matt from him again, because Matt was _his_ , and he was _Matt's_ , and he'd be Goddamned if anything wormed its way in between them.

"Love you, Matty," he finally managed, and he knew those were three words he'd never said in sequence before, but it felt like something he'd already been saying for years. His voice was all twisted up, all his noises jumbled together with sobbing and gasping. "Stay with me. Okay? Just a while longer."

Matt hummed a small 'Okay' under his breath, and shut his eyes, and Foggy could feel the weak smile against his neck. He didn't think anything could make him cry harder than just having Matt alive with him but he was so fucking wrong.

He knew that the infection might still take Matt from him. If not, the virus would follow behind. Foggy would hold on until the entire world burned to ash around them. If the world was going to take Matt away from him, he sure as Hell wasn't going to let go without a struggle, and while Matt was a dirty-fighting feral, Foggy could be just as relentless, and in the end, he knew he would be the one to draw the most blood in order to keep what belonged to him.

Matt rubbed idly at Foggy's collarbone, too weak to offer comfort in any other way. Foggy accepted it like he accepted the sobs thrashing in his chest, and wrapped one of his own hands around Matt's, holding it close and keeping it safe.

\---

It didn't take too long for Foggy to stop crying, because the agony from his leg was crawling up in his brain, shoving the relief aside to take center stage in Foggy's head. His sobbing switched from his version of _Mine mine mine_ to sharp, hitching gasps of pain because his disintegrating bones were turning to magma, crawling up the remainder of his shin, creeping up over his knee and into his gut. He needed to take something for it, before it got worse.

Matt was traveling over and over through a cycle of rough gasping to harsh coughing, to pained groans and easier, shuddering breaths for air, then slowly he'd loop back to the gasping and start all over again. There was gunk everywhere, but Foggy didn't care enough to be disgusted about it. He'd had a rag in the duffel, at least, and he knew it wasn't ever going to be able to be used for anything ever again after what Matt was putting it through.

Eventually, Foggy's poorly-masked noises of agony and sharp breathing grabbed Matt's attention, and he shifted in Foggy's arms. He coughed and spat a few times before talking.

"Foggy..." he paused for air, "...okay?"

"My leg, buddy." He hissed a long breath through his nose. "It hurts."

Matt's face crumpled, Foggy could tell. Matt's frown had been pressed into his neck for hours, but now everything else felt downturned, too. "Pill," Matt said, fingers tapping along in the dip of Foggy's collarbone.

"We're running out." The pain felt like a living thing stampeding through his veins and arteries and he grit his teeth for a moment before continuing, "You need them too, Matt."

Matt paused a few minutes to think. The pain rose and fell, rose and fell, burning through Foggy's nerves. He didn't know it was possible for a leg that no longer existed to be so agonizing.

"P—I _p_ —I _puke_ ," Matt told him, shame heavy in his voice. "You take."

Foggy shook his head and felt the warmth of Matt's skin shifting across his own. "You puked 'cause you're sick, not because you can't—" he hissed, swallowed, kept going, "—can't take them. You need to take them."

"Need to take them," Matt echoed. "You need. Take."

"I know."

Matt hummed, gasped, coughed. "Share."

Foggy sighed. "Do you think if I gave you more, you could keep them down? They'll—they'll make you feel better."

"Don't want. To puke."

"Yeah. It's a waste."

"Waste," Matt echoed again. He always echoed more when he was out of his element. God, all conversations were out of his element. "Don't want. Puke," he repeated, shifting slightly. "You take."

"I will if you do. I don't care if you throw them up. You need to take them."

Matt tried humming again, and it rumbled against the infection in his chest like a growl in reverse. "I take," he mumbled. "You take."

Well, it was a compromise. Matt wasn't normally about those. Foggy tried to stay as still as he could while also reaching for the duffel bag. He didn't want to do a goddamned thing but of course Matt was curled up in his lap, and his good leg was going to sleep, and Matt needed to be somewhere comfortable or he'd never get better. They had to get the fuck up, get to the futon at least. The space between them and the living room seemed like a gulf. Foggy definitely wasn't going to be able to get up, but they had to do something. They couldn't lay around with the puke on the kitchen floor all day.

"Here we go, buddy," he said, at length, "you gotta take some meds, okay?"

Matt grunted and wormed himself in closer. "No."

His leg made his words angier and sharper than they needed to be, and he couldn't prevent it. "Stop with that shit, Matt, you're taking the pills."

The trembling body in Foggy's arms flinched, and the warm face against his neck moved away. A chill swept into its place. "Foggy, yes. Sorry," Matt mumbled, obedient and submissive. Turning to instinct because he had nothing else, no barriers built or bridges constructed; he didn't have a mind like Foggy did, not any more. Everything was instinct and instinct was strongest when he was stressed or afraid.

It made Foggy sigh and the sigh turned into a groan halfway out, and that spooked Matt even more. "No, no, Matt, I'm not mad, I—" he shifted again, trying to reach out, to tell Matt with touch that he wasn't upset, just in pain, and when he flexed the muscles in his leg to try to get closer the pain flared and roared like a wild thing in his mind and he screamed, short but loud, so loud he could hear it echo in the garage.

Matt panicked and scrabbled around, either trying to flee or get closer, Foggy couldn't tell, because there wasn't a thing in his mind more important than the pain and getting it the fuck away. He could hear himself crying, and felt his fingernails digging into something, hard and desperate, trying to draw attention from his leg.

He heard his name, _Foggy, Foggy_ , the little voice breaking his name into two, a shivering hand on his shoulder, and sharp gasping, and then his forehead brushed against something cold and there wasn't anything at all.

\---

Foggy came to just as roughly as he'd gone out, lifting his head with a snort and trying to push himself up on his arms. There was a hand on him immediately and he lashed out on reflex with a sharp cry that was half Matt's name and half a wail of fear. He was in the tunnel. Roaring and blood in all directions. Where was Karen? Was she okay?

The hand came back with a partner, one of them steady and the other shaking—a feral, a feral, _a feral_ —and he swung out again, shouting for Matt, for Karen, for anyone to help him, but there was no-one. He'd forced Karen away and Matt was steeped in blood in the subway and—

No, wait, those were in the wrong order. Karen had left after the tunnel, she'd fled and she'd taken his leg with her. Matt wasn't covered in blood anymore because he wasn't injured on the outside where it could be seen, he was hurt inside, deep down where bandages and words couldn't reach. His chest and his lungs and his brain. Matt was dying like the rest of him, and he'd been here, Foggy had just been holding him seconds ago.

"Matt," he cried, and opened his eyes, flailing one arm for purchase that was already there because he'd been face-down on the kitchen floor with Matt clutching the duffel bag in front of him and dust swirling all around them. The mess of dream and memory faded and he immediately forgot what he'd been screaming about in the first place. He was panting, though, and that told him enough.

Matt was shivering just a few feet away, his skin so pale that Foggy couldn't even be sure there was blood left inside him. He was still gasping, eyes glazed and bloodshot, pulling in breaths over half-bared teeth and letting them out with short rattling sighs, a weak percussion that was nothing more than an imitation growl. "Foggy."

"What happened?" he asked, even though he could hazard a rough guess. He'd passed out, like in the subway bathroom. The fog started to lift from his thoughts, and he struggled to get them straightened back out.

"Foggy, you..." Matt shifted a little closer, wincing, "fall. Sleep."

"How long?"

His tiny voice was so hesitant and quiet. "It, mm, not... not a lot." Eyes flicking somewhere near the wall across from them, he reached up with his good hand to wipe his running eyes and his nose before coughing some more. Of course, he didn't know how to cover his cough with his hand, but he did have the rag from before; he fumbled for it and hacked and heaved into it, his expression crumbling from the pain.

Foggy could only reach out, a movement that he couldn't stop himself from doing, and there was his leg again, the bones sifting to ash, agony shuddering through his body like a lightning strike. He screamed again, but was able to bite it back halfway through that time. It still echoed distantly in the garage. Heaving for breath, he rested his temple on the floor, swallowing and willing the pain to subside. It retreated only slightly, a carrion bird pacing just out of reach waiting for a splash of blood and rot.

Matt was there after a silent, pained moment, scooting timidly across the kitchen floor and bringing the duffel bag with him. His right arm was pressed against his side, leaving him to struggle with the left. The unreliable fingers fumbled along the fabric, refusing to close around the handle of the bag—Foggy had seen it before but never so badly. Like Matt had been transplanted into a body that wasn't his own, and he was scratching at the inside, howling and desperate for control.

He was blinking hard as he tugged the bag over so that Foggy could reach it, and for the first time in the weak cuttings of light through the tarp over the kitchen window, Foggy saw the split gash in his cheek, the one that'd been sutured shut a lifetime ago. There were a few stitches still left behind, curled amongst the scruff and rain burns. Foggy blinked; when had they been ripped open? Why hadn't he fixed them?

Foggy took another glance, grasping for a distraction, to get his mind away from his leg. Eyes moving up and down Matt's gaunt body, hunting down the injustices. His broken finger, the tape gone, knuckle still swollen. A blue-black bruise across half his face. Concern and pain heavy in his expression. His breath clouding in the air.

Matt licked his lips. "Foggy." There were so many ways he spoke Foggy's name, so many extra definitions and interpretations. Some of them said _I hurt_ or _I'm scared_ or _I'm tired, please let me sleep_ , but this one was low and weak, a simple _Let me help. I want to help._ "Foggy."

"Yeah, Matty," he mumbled, concentration breaking, leg rearing up, gashing at the back of his thoughts to spill them out where he couldn't find them. His hand stumbled over the bag just like Matt's, clumsy and awkward, and he realized it was because he was freezing, his joints made stiff by the cold air of the kitchen.

Whatever, they could get back to the futon and warm up later, when Foggy wasn't biting his cheek so hard from the pain. He shifted halfway up, then dropped back down with a grunt. "Help me, Matt. Help me sit up."

Matt sidled closer, breaths still locked into a rattling pattern of gasp, huff, gasp, switching hands so he could tug Foggy up with the steady one. It wasn't clear if it was because it was the stronger of the two, or if Matt was hiding again, trying not to frighten the people around him with the tremor. He settled down at Foggy's left, leaning their sides together, each keeping the other upright.

Foggy, to his credit, didn't scream again, but he bit down harder on his cheek, sending the taste of hot copper across his own tongue. He'd tasted worse. A black river, stagnant water, food from rusted cans. His mind chased every little thought he could create, trying to find another thing to focus on, but it always snapped back to his leg, how the burning had gone from bonfire to nuclear blast.

"Foggy," Matt said. _I want to know if you're okay._ He brought the duffel closer. "Pill."

"Yeah. Pill," he echoed, and heard the strange huff indicating slight confusion, or bemusement, because he wasn't supposed to be repeating Matt, it was supposed to be the other way around. He pawed through the surgical tools, the gauze, the turkey baster, all the random bullshit that wasn't medication, and dug out the painkillers. Tramadol, Tylenol, Midol. The bottles rattled, nearly empty. "Give me your hand, Matt."

Matt didn't move. "You, me."

Foggy groaned, half annoyance and half total agony. He didn't have time to play tug-of-war over who was the most stubborn; Matt would win anyway. Putting the painkillers back down, he kept digging through the bag. Matt could take the tramadol and the Midol later, but there wasn't much left of any of the three, and Matt needed the pain relief or he wasn't going to be able to cough, and if he didn't cough, the infection would spread and thicken and he would simply drown in it.

"Foggy." _Take the medication, you asshole._

He pushed out a breath, worrying at his bottom lip, ignoring the taste of blood. There were so few supplies, so few of the painkillers, and while his leg was shrieking, his worry for Matt was getting louder. Foggy pushed a hand down his face, ignoring the swelling over his cheekbone and the sting of the rain burns, then went back into the bag, down to the bottom, digging out the battered little box with the cotton balls and the small vial inside. Ketamine. Half-dose. It might work.

Matt went suddenly still next to him, his gasps going high-pitched as a whine tried to get out past them. "Fog. No, Foggy," he breathed, voice pleading, putting his hands on the floor. His back was bowed and shivering, eyes darting around.

"Hey, hey—it's—" Foggy half-turned toward him and he flinched, hard, a wail caught in the back of his throat. "Hey! I'm not gonna drug you, it's for me. It's for me, Matt."

That seemed to be an even worse option as far as Matt was concerned, because a hard frown crashed into his face and he jerked his head in a shake. "Not good, Foggy. Pill." _Don't take that. Take the pills._ He didn't move away but he didn't move any closer, shivering all over. "Don't want... want... want you. Want you to take. Puke."

"I'm not gonna put myself to sleep, okay? It's just for the pain."

"Foggy, no."

"You don't get to choose, Matt. It's for me. I'm going to take it for my leg, and you're going to take the pills for your ribs." His words were hardening again, getting more forceful, and Matt responded immediately, instinctively, bowing his head, turning his face away. It was not a surprising sight.

While Foggy knew that Karen had always thought of Matt being removed from them, no longer human, Foggy was well-aware of pack mentality and hierarchy. In any other situation, Matt would be alpha, he would make the decisions, he would lead and he would protect, but somehow, Foggy had gotten to the top of the ladder, and he wasn't even feral.

Yet. His shoulder tingled and burned.

He ignored it and spoke again. "Are you going to take them, Matt?" he asked, trying to sound gentle, but he slid into instinct in the same way Matt always did, taking charge, doing what he knew needed to be done.

Matt kept his face half to the ground, half to the wall, and hummed. "Foggy, yes."

"Awesome, dude," he said, feeling and hearing the strain in his words. He dug out a syringe, ripping it from its protective wrapping, and read the back of the vial about twenty times before cautiously pulling up a dosage. Matt flinched and kept himself turned away, body thrumming with tension and stress and illness, but he didn't remove himself from Foggy's side, keeping them both upright with his own body.

There wasn't much ketamine left, either. He pulled the needle from the vial—Matt shivered harder, flinched again, whined softly—and held it between his lips. Grunting, he shifted his weight, yanking down the edge of his pants to find an injection site on his own goddamn body, and Matt grabbed his free hand with his steady one, automatically leaning back as a counterbalance.

"Thanks, buddy."

Matt hummed faintly.

There wasn't much viable muscle, except on his ass, and that was where he stuck the needle, not even feeling the sting past his leg. No alcohol, but he'd rather risk an infection from a needle stick than stay floundering in the pain of a leg he didn't have anymore.

He tossed the needle away and straightened back up, and he didn't want to let go of Matt's cold hand, but he had to in order to gather up the pills. "You need to take them fast, Matt. I don't know how... how awake I'm gonna be. I've never taken ketamine for pain before."

"You say, not sleep."

"No, but... you know, in the tunnel, when you were tired? Sleepy? And you were awake, but you... weren't really? Kind of both at the same time?"

Matt looked ashamed; he bowed his head again. "Yes."

"It'll be like that, okay? I'll still be here. I won't leave you alone."

He gasped, huffed, gasped, huffed. His breath was still visible in the air. "Foggy, okay," he mumbled, leaning a little closer, holding his steady hand out. "Pill. I t—I t—I _will_ take."

"We should get out of the kitchen first. It's cold. Do you think you can walk, buddy?"

Matt thought for a few moments, then put his hands under himself and tried to stand. He only got a few inches up before dropping back down; even his own body seemed like too much weight for him to carry. "No." More shame, more looking away. It would have been irritating if it wasn't so fucking sad.

"Yeah, me either."

"I w—I t—I..." he huffed, rubbing his face, frustrated. "I try, Foggy. Will try."

"Don't hurt yourself."

Matt blinked at the floor, then scooted away as gently as he could with his spasming, erratic body, careful not to let Foggy drop down to the floor all at once. He made his way over to the slanted kitchen island and paused for breath before reaching up and grabbing the edge of the countertop to heave himself to his feet. There just wasn't any strength in him, anywhere. He moved like a corpse, but he got himself standing, and smiled in Foggy's direction. It was weak but it was definitely a smile; triumph, optimism. He was Matt again, not a blood-soaked monster or a terrified animal.

"See? I walk," he breathed, then paused to ride out a coughing fit, leaning himself harder against the island so he wouldn't collapse to the floor. Up there, under slightly different light, the black sludge looked more grayish, a little greenish, with what looked like the consistency of egg whites.

Anyone else might have been disgusted, but Foggy just stared, studying, searching for flashes of red that meant he'd fucked up his trachea, or his lungs, or was bleeding internally. Karen said Matt had been bleeding internally, and Foggy realized she might have been intentionally lying; he felt his anger flare again, tangled with sadness, and it felt so confusing that he just shook his head and tried to sigh the bullshit out of himself.

Matt cleared his throat and wiped his mouth, then set his feet before starting off back to Foggy, the lines of pain on his face determined and unmoving. He offered out a hand, but Foggy just shook his head.

"Get the blankets and stuff, not me. I can't walk, Matt."

The pain-lines shifted into a heavy frown; Matt blinked and went about shakily gathering the duffel bag first. God, he was wobbly and unsure, but he was pushing through it like he always did, even though he could barely fucking breathe. Trust Matt to be the one to survive a fatal alien virus _and_ a chest infection. Four broken ribs. A tussle with a full-grown alien.

He supposed there _had_ to be a reason the asshole had been a superhero before all this bullshit went down. Senses? No. Stubbornness? Yes.

But Foggy watched Matt move, and the worry swept back in. There was no guarantee that Matt would survive even if he was walking at the moment. All it would take was for the infection to choke him, get so tangled up inside of him that he'd suffocate. It could happen at any point. In his sleep, most likely.

There he was, though, clumsily making his way back to the kitchen to get the blankets. He hovered, his feet unsure, and clung to the doorjamb, still frowning in Foggy's direction. For a second it looked like he was about to talk, but then he just sighed and got the blankets, and Foggy swallowed about a hundred times before grabbing the pistol and following him back into the living room.

It was awkward, getting back on the futon. Foggy had to lever himself up on his own; Matt's energy was gone by the time he returned with the blankets, and he sat down as heavily as a man his size could, panting for breath, scratching at his throat as if he could claw the infection out of it. In the darkness of the living room, he appeared monochrome. A shadow, a ghost.

"Foggy." _It hurts._

"I know. Just a sec," Foggy bit out, squinting as he rode through the undertow of leg and loss. He was going to bust a hole in his cheek if he kept it up. Every nudge and jostle made him want to just lie down, fall down to the gross carpet and never get up again. His heart was pounding, his body taut, anticipating a rolling tsunami of pain. God, not that. He'd pass out again.

Matt was breathing hard, head leaning on the upright futon mattress, eyes going from still and fixed to rapid half-panicked movement and back again. His hands dropped to his lap and he made a whining noise. Foggy didn't even have to hear a name to interpret it. _Help me._

"Going as fast as I can." He tossed the pistol onto the coffee table and dragged the duffel bag over, seeking out the medications. Tramadol, Midol, and the antibiotics that probably weren't doing shit but Foggy wasn't going to stop giving him. His hands were shaking, head carrying a distant buzz. Shit. Not yet, he still had crap to do.

Thank fuck there was still some water in the cup on the coffee table from earlier. Foggy grappled at the bottles, opening them and carefully picking out the pills. A repeat of the last bunch he'd given Matt—the two kinds of antibiotics they happened to have, the Midol, and tramadol.

Foggy cupped them in one palm and grabbed the water with the other. "Here."

It took Matt a few seconds to realize he was being handed something, and he let out a small, begrudging sound before taking the pills and shoving them in his mouth. Foggy nearly deflated in relief once he got the pills down, and then he actually deflated and leaned against Matt's side, blinking slowly, waiting for the buzz in his head to get harsher and heavier.

Had he given himself too much? He didn't want to be unconscious, that'd be leaving Matt alone, and what if Matt got worse? Matt wouldn't know what to do.

The pain in his leg was fading. Actually fading. Jesus. Foggy rubbed his tongue along the inside of his cheek, feeling in his head that he'd made a mistake but feeling in his body like it was the best thing he could have possibly done. He shifted around and laid down on the futon, grasping around blindly for... what? What was he looking for, again?

"Matty," he mumbled, head spinning. Too much. He gave himself too much.

Well, at least he hadn't needed to use the gun. He probably should have been scared, but he couldn't feel anything but relief from the pain. It was euphoric.

"Foggy?" _Translation unavailable_.

"'M tired, Matty. 'M so tired." Foggy gave up his search for the thing he couldn't remember, and curled up on his side, eyes stinging with relief as the pain floated to the back of his head, a lingering mist instead of a whirling storm.

"...Foggy, sleep."

Yeah, he was definitely heading there, sliding down a slope that he couldn't climb back up. How could he? He was missing a fucking leg.

Matt stayed sitting up, like he'd been directed to last night, and Foggy realized that he didn't even know what fucking time it was, how long they'd been curled in the kitchen together. He opened his mouth to ask Matt and forgot about the words halfway through and decided to just move closer instead, pillowing his head on Matt's thigh, feeling the faint rumble of the tremor.

With a tentative gentleness, Matt rubbed his shaking palm on Foggy's head, then trailed his fingers through Foggy's hair, humming under his breath. Not a looking-for-words hum, it was a melody, and Foggy listened closely, chasing it, trying to figure out what it was from. It was so familiar.

What was it?

Foggy shut his eyes and let out a long breath, reveling in the absence of pain. Matt gasped above him but kept messing with his hair, a tactile object. He didn't have anything else. Neither of them did.

The song.

It popped into his mind suddenly, like he'd put a needle on a record:

_And did I hear you say he'd be meeting you here today, to take you to his mansion in the sky?_

He fell asleep.


	30. ever the same (part two)

He woke up and immediately vomited.

Matt was there, not dead, still breathing, clutching at his shoulder so Foggy didn't tumble off of the futon along with what he was chucking out of his stomach. It tasted like burnt things and blood, three-day-old spit and the bitter tang of alien mercury. There wasn't really anything solid in him to throw up; he spent a long time leaning over the edge of the mattress, waiting for another spasm and more unproductive heaving.

There was so much goddamn spit in his mouth that his head was swimming in it. Foggy distantly watched it dribble to the floor, feeling Matt's chest shivering, listening to the staggered breathing against his back, and wondering why it felt like they'd already done this a hundred times. One hand was clutching at his shoulder, the fingers weak and shaking, a second was braced against his side.

Foggy dug his fingernails into the damp edge of the futon, swallowing back bile and spit, squeezing the tears out of his eyes. His spasming stomach felt like a knife, his leg a distant wildfire, and Matt's tremor an earthquake rattling in the background of it all.

The nausea slowly faded, and the hand against his side shifted and danced its way hesitantly up to his neck, Matt's freezing fingers leaving strange chilled trails along his skin. He shoved himself up as gently as he could, and Matt helped, tugging him along with weak, jerking little movements. He was trying really fucking hard to be careful with his leg, and his caution of course meant that he was definitely gonna drag it along the raised back of the futon like the fucking idiot he was and set his nerves alight with agony. He screamed, loud and hoarse against Matt's leg, and felt Matt's panic more than he heard or saw it; the cold, shivering hands moving desperately along Foggy's arms like they could pick up the pain and simply carry it away.

Matt mumbled Foggy's name, or at least that was what it sounded like. It was hard to tell past the gasping, the rattling breathing, the low whimpers of anxiety.

"Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ," Foggy hissed, clutching the edge of the mattress until his knuckles were bone-white, trying to focus on anything but his leg—the alien smell of the apartment, the damp fabric under his fingers, Matt's attempts at breathing. No matter what he did, how hard he tried to let other shit distract him, the leg came right back and dragged him away, back to the tunnel that it had all come from. He cursed aloud again, a long string of four-letter words, his voice rising, then went still, waiting to see if his leg faded into a distant drumbeat instead of a howling roar in his ears.

It took a long fucking time. He was shuddering by the end of it, face burnt and callous with tears, his jaw torqued up so tightly it hurt to relax it. Amputation was supposed to _help_ with the pain by removing the infection, not make it fifty times worse. Recalling how it had felt in the school bus felt so much like nostalgia, a better time in his life, that he wanted to vomit again.

He couldn't even come up with the strength to imagine his life before all this: the poison and the aliens, the virus and the dust. That felt like another world, another life entirely. A dream. Comprehending that things used to be so peaceful and easy wasn't possible anymore.

Matt was still clutching him; Foggy could feel his chest jumping as he breathed, the distant curl of warmth against the back of his neck whenever he exhaled. Foggy squeezed the never-fucking-ending tears out of his eyes and grit his teeth as he tried to get himself back up again. Matt's shivering arm hitched itself against his chest and pulled him half-upright, and Foggy let gravity do the rest of the job. He ended up dropping in an awkward, rough flop against Matt's thigh.

And then the earthquake again, rattling under his skin, between his bones, over and under and straight through every inch of him. It brought the nausea rushing back, winding through his stomach and jumping up into his throat, and Foggy shoved himself back upright, swallowing back the bile as he tried to get away from it. His leg dug its claws into his brain but the sharp taste in his mouth and the stabbing pain in his gut got him through it. No, he couldn't vomit any more, he was already dehydrated, he couldn't afford to—

"Fog," Matt mumbled, spreading his shaking hand clumsily between Foggy's shoulder blades and trying to keep him still with the other. Surely trying to stop Foggy from falling to the floor, but all Foggy could think of was getting away from the tremor.

"Get off," he snapped, only distantly aware of the sharpness of his words as he shifted his way awkwardly down the futon, trying to put more space between him and that damned shaking.

Matt let him go, pulling his hands back to himself like he'd been the one to personally go and snap Foggy's leg off. He moved further down the futon to lengthen the gap between them, and through the haze that was his leg and his stomach Foggy could see him bow his head, turn his face away. That wasn't what Foggy wanted, but he didn't fucking care. He wanted it to stop. He just wanted all of it to fucking stop.

So, the ketamine again. He didn't want to. He had to. It was all a haze: digging out the syringe, drawing up the dosage—only half the size of the last, he wasn't a complete idiot—and biting down hard on the needle cap as he fumbled around to find the muscle in his own leg and get the drug into it. He tossed the needle onto the table and felt his teeth grinding together as he clamped down harder onto the bit of plastic in his mouth, waiting for the drug to take effect.

It was ages. Months, weeks, hours, years. Didn't fucking matter. It was all the same moment, stretching on and on, him afire in the center of it. He stayed sitting up, and he was proud of that; his back taut like a bowstring, his teeth eventually obliterating the plastic in his mouth before he spat it out onto the floor with the rest of the refuse.

He didn't even know how long he'd been asleep. What time it was. If Matt was okay. If Karen was—

Shit. Right. Karen wasn't there anymore. He kept forgetting. She'd been such a natural part of his life that losing a leg felt less alien than losing her. A huge trench gouged in his world, right next to the one Matt was trying so hard to fill, but when things broke, they rarely fit back into the spaces they'd come from. Foggy knew that more than anyone.

As the ketamine went to work, he felt the muscles in his body starting to relax, the firestorm spreading under his skin starting to finally relent. His jaw hurt and his back hurt and the skin on his face burned but it was something other than the leg, and he latched onto the lesser pain as greedily as he could. Sore muscles were a lot different than missing limbs.

Foggy swallowed back the bile in his mouth and let out a grunt through his nose, eyes burnt with tears. Everything started wavering; he wasn't sure if he was high on the ketamine or high on the relief from pain. He said something else, a curse that he forgot as soon as it left his mouth, and let out a breath so long and harsh it felt like nothing of himself would be left when it was done.

If only he could be so lucky.

As slowly as he could, inch by inch, he shifted himself backwards so he could lean his head on the futon's backrest. He swallowed, staring up at the ceiling, the discolored stains that had been there far before Karen had moved them in, breathing hard, submerging himself into the euphoria that was a retreat from the pain.

Like the tides going out, his focus came back, bringing with it the sound of Matt's breathing and the wind battering against the window tarp outside. They were so similar, the two noises, coming in to his right and left, his broken world in stereo. He shut his eyes and spoke, trying to make his voice gentle.

"Matt?"

No reply. Foggy turned his head to the side, and Matt was still in the same spot, too weak to get up and move somewhere else. There was something in his hands that he was fiddling with, and his face was turned down and away, his viral instincts overriding everything else.

"Matt. Can you talk to me?"

"Nn," he attempted, and then he lost his grip on the word, and it fell away.

Foggy sighed and put his hands gingerly down on the futon to scoot himself over. He started off trying to keep his leg stiff and still, but locking the muscles taut made the pain rush back in, so he tried to relax it, praying he wouldn't bump it on anything in the hazy light the vinegar lamp was giving them. It throbbed and itched and burned like nothing else in his life had ever done. He tried not to think about it. He tried to focus on what was outside of himself, not inside, though Matt had been a presence in both for years.

"Come on. Talk to me," he said, getting back to Matt's side. He heard another weak grunt, vaguely affirmative, and reached over to put his fingers on Matt's throat. Rapid pulse, warm skin—warm enough that Matt leaned into Foggy's icy touch, trying to get more. That wasn't good.

"It's okay, Matty. I'm here." The worry flared stronger, twisted and turned through his stomach and curled around his words like a vice. Matt was always too cold and hunting for warmth, not the other way around. "You have a fever, buddy," he said, letting the anxiety distract him from his leg, prolonging his balancing act between the loss of his limb and the impending loss of his friend.

At this point, it'd be a miracle if Matt recovered without intervention. Foggy knew that, and Matt probably knew it too. The thought forced more tears into Foggy's eyes. He shouldn't be accepting it. They should have both been fighting it, tooth and nail and everything in between, but Karen had been too busy with herself and Foggy had been too busy driving her away.

"Matt. Pay attention to me."

Another grunt—negative, that time. A 'no' that he couldn't hold captive in his mouth. All he had was the usual: "Foggy." An exhausted _Leave me alone._

Foggy almost asked why, but then sluggishly realized that he already had the answer. Sometimes he couldn't understand Matt's circular thought process, but maybe the ketamine was helping, because he stared at Matt's shivering submission, let out a breath, and said, "I'm not mad at you." Of course Matt would think that. All it took was a sharp tone, and he'd flee in every way he could manage. "I'm sorry I snapped."

No use. Matt only tried to put more space between them, but he was already on the edge of the futon, and if he moved any further, he'd be on the floor. Comfort overriding safety—that was a human need, not reflexive animal instinct. A good sign, which Foggy accepted gratefully, even though he was still being stonewalled.

He sighed, swallowed. "Come on, Matt. Stop doing this."

And of course nothing but stubborn silence filled with rattling breaths, Matt's hands continuing to mess with whatever it was they had. Foggy thought it was just clothes, but he squinted in the dark and thought he saw a weak flicker of dirty light off of dirtier metal.

Foggy fought off a wave of anger as he figured out what it was. A silver dog whistle on a twisted chain. Karen's whistle. Leaving it there for Matt to torture himself over. She should have known he'd do that.

She probably did.

"Don't." Foggy tried to take the whistle, but Matt only grumbled and held on tighter. "Don't mess with this. She doesn't—she doesn't matter anymore, okay?"

Matt half-turned his face back toward him, huffing a low and almost petulant growl, strangled around the infection in his chest. "Karen matter." The admonishment was clear in his weak, croaking voice. "Foggy. No."

"Yes, Matt. Stop it."

He turned his face away again. "I miss. I want."

"She doesn't want _you_ , Matt."

Foggy felt his own breathing stagger as he winced at his own words, and for a while, the only noise in the room was the sandpaper scrape of breathing. In the dark, he could see the frown dragging down Matt's expression, the twitch and quiver of muscles as he—God damnit—tried not to cry, and ended up crying anyway.

It was useless to try to take the whistle now, and Foggy had to choose his battles. He rubbed his face, fighting down the anger and irritation. It wouldn't help. He had to stay calm in order for Matt to stay calm. Foggy pulled his intact leg up on the futon, folding it underneath him while struggling not to collapse. There wasn't any strength to be found anywhere. He felt like a puppet with its strings cut. All he wanted to do was sleep; the thought buzzed in his head and wouldn't go away.

Leaning his temple on the backrest because he couldn't keep his head up, he chewed his tongue for a moment and said, "You need to let me take care of you."

Matt curled his hands around the whistle. "Mn."

"Come here."

"No."

Foggy sighed. "I just want to take care of you. _Matt._ " He laid a hand on Matt's elbow before gently curling his fingers around it, feeling the muscles spasming against his palm. " _Please_." That tone crept into his voice again, as boss-dad as he could possibly get, and Matt bowed his head a little bit more, eyes wet and darting, before shoving the whistle in his hoodie pocket and leaning toward Foggy.

He pulled Matt closer without a fight, ignoring his grumbling half-growls at being jostled. "There. Come right here." Foggy's eyes stung. "You're not gonna die on me, asshole."

Matt's eyes rolled weakly and Foggy wasn't too sure what the reason was. "Not," he grunted.

"Not what?"

"Not die."

"That's...that's what I'm trying to prevent right now." He got Matt across the space between them, pressing the back of one hand against Matt's forehead before placing his other palm on Matt's neck, seeking his fluttering pulse. His skin was dry and pale, with bruises dappled dark around his eyes and behind the scabbed gash from the territory squabble that had happened a half a leg ago. "You're really warm."

Matt blinked slowly, eyes glazed. "Not cold."

"That's what warm means." Foggy had no idea how long he'd been asleep, but it had to have been a while for Matt's pills to wear off. "You need the..." he didn't bother to explain, and dropped his hands so he could move toward the coffee table, careful not to flex the muscles in his leg. The room spun abruptly all around him, and he had to steady himself on the edge of the table to stop from falling.

"Foggy." Matt's hands were on his shoulders again—no, just his right hand. The one that wasn't shaking. "Caref," he mumbled, forgetting the second syllable.

"Yeah." He braced himself on the table, staring at the lamp, blinking at the pale light like an entranced moth. Vertigo battering at his head. It was almost funny that he was nearly collapsing from the drugs instead of the pain. The laugh that bubbled weakly in his chest exited as a groan instead.

A soft whine followed like reflex, weak and breathy alongside the sound of sandpaper rubbing against his ear. "Foggy, sit."

"Gotta get your stuff first." He let out a breath in a failed attempt to center himself, then dug his fingers under the lip of the coffee table and tugged it across the carpet, ignoring the foamy mess of vomit and the dark stains he was dragging it through. Foggy pulled one corner flush against the futon and dragged his duffel over, digging around for the pills.

Matt's head tilted toward the faint rattling of the bottles, nudging his temple gently against Foggy's shoulder. His gasping became uneven before he shifted away and grasped at the futon's backrest to pull himself up.

"Hey—no. Don't. You're—"

"Okay," Matt said, his jaw jumping as he clenched them around the pain, grinding the words out slowly. "...I am okay."

"Matt." The tone crept into his voice again, the one that he didn't even realize until then wasn't boss-dad at all. It was that of an alpha—the leader of this broken feral's scattered, mismatched pack. A position Foggy didn't want or need, but had fallen into anyway. He softened his voice, uncomfortable with the implication, and grabbed Matt's elbow again. "Stay here, all right?"

"Water."

"I'll go get it."

For a second, Matt paused, leaning into Foggy's grip, gnawing at his bottom lip in thought—looking for words. It took a long time. His voice was so slow, so fractured. "Need. Foggy. I have."

"Have what?"

He blinked rapidly in frustration and gestured to himself, his lower half, what still remained of him and what didn't remain of Foggy. "I have," he repeated.

"It doesn't matter. You're going to pass out again and I'm not gonna be able to get to you."

Matt gave him a grunt, the stubborn bastard, and pried Foggy's fingers off of his elbow, carefully pulling himself to his feet. He immediately swayed hard and clutched onto the futon, and Foggy stiffened, preparing to catch him, but Matt just swallowed, took a fraction of a breath, and started off anyway. His steps were shuffling, wobbly, like he'd been the one to take the ketamine, but he kept going, slow and steady.

Foggy sighed, and stared, and knew better than to try to stop him. "Be careful."

"Am caref. Caref-fff." He juggled the syllables while making his way to the kitchen, nearly bumping face-first into the door before putting his hand out at the last second to find it. Foggy felt himself paying closer attention. Matt, his head full of pressure and likely unable to smell or balance himself, would have to be using his memorization of the apartment's layout to make his way around.

It was so easy to forget about Matt's eyes sometimes. He was always aware of his surroundings, hard-wired into the ruins all around them. Now, it was like someone had severed the connections, and Matt was left fumbling around in the dark like everyone else. He pushed the kitchen door open, stumbling inside, and Foggy became just as blind as he was when it swung shut behind him.

Foggy watched the door, gripping onto the futon's mattress, feeling the pain and the ketamine thrashing against each other in his body. He could hear Matt mumbling on the other side of the door, the first syllable of 'careful', over and over—which made no fucking sense until a few minutes went by and he realized Matt was doing it on purpose so Foggy would know he hadn't passed out in there.

But Matt came back, like he always did, holding a discolored cardboard box and clutching it mostly with his right hand as he tottered hesitantly over. His head tilted and twitched all around as if listening for something.

"This way, Matt," Foggy said softly, guiding him with his voice. "Four steps this way."

"Yes." He furrowed his brows and moved carefully, mouthing the steps as he counted them. His shin knocked against the table first, and he paused, head tilting toward Foggy. "Where?"

"The table's right under you, buddy. Careful."

"Care." Matt's face changed for one short instant, maybe more if Foggy hadn't blinked. He set the box down and shuffled to the futon, finding it clumsily with his hands before sitting down with a rattling _whumph_ of air. His pale, bruised, burned face tried to provide a smile. "Full, Foggy. Am care— _care—_ "

The cough interrupted, tore through his system like a freight train, the hacking coming so quickly he didn't have time to get any air in between. He tried to keep himself up with one arm on the mattress and the other hugging his side, but his strength failed him, eyes rolling around with anxious disorientation as he listed hard to the left like a foundering ship, sinking down onto the mattress, still coughing and coughing. It wouldn't stop.

One of Foggy's hands found Matt's chest and the other took Matt's elbow to keep him from pitching to the floor. No, no, _no_ , not again, they couldn't do this again. He couldn't hold Matt and wail and sob and stare and stare and wait for him to die, but that was what was happening, it was just in a different place. Matt was just laid out on the futon mattress instead of bundled up in his arms in the kitchen.

"Oh, no no no." His words tumbled out of him, panicked and rushed, "Shh-shh-shh, Matty, just try to breathe, you need to breathe."

Matt's face twisted. Grey foam bubbled at the corners of his mouth. Terror locked into his expression, terror and pain and a slipping focus, his eyes going dull, still. Horrible noises in his chest that might have been mistaken for a roaring growl were they not clogged in black infection and Foggy's incompetence and Karen's past. Matt twitched against the mattress, turned his face weakly into it, fought and fought and fought to draw air, to pull in _anything,_ but nothing came.

Everything else just...stopped, for Foggy. Digging out pills, getting the water—even the buzz and burn of his leg faded like static into the background as he yanked Matt up from the futon, ignoring his whimper of pain, sitting him against the backrest to try and make it easier for him to—

"Breathe, Matt, come on, come on, you have to _breathe_."

Matt scrabbled at Foggy's chest with one hand, a movement that didn't really seem to have a purpose, like it was reflex, and the twisted pain in Foggy's gut got tighter and tighter, more and more agonizing until he wasn't breathing, either. He rubbed at Matt's throat like he could get the sickness out of it, eyes hunting for a response, for anything more than another sign that he was about to lose his best—his _only_ —friend. Everything he had, his whole world, was right there on the futon.

More coughing and nothing else. Foggy watched, feeling cold horror as more black shit came out with no air going in. He scooted closer, trying to help, praying for this to not be it, _please God Jesus please_ , Matt couldn't die, not right here and now, no way could it be so sudden, Foggy wasn't ready—he wasn't _ready!_

It'd been too long to go without a breath, Foggy knew that, and he felt himself sobbing, rubbing between Matt's bony shoulder blades as he babbled out hushed words of broken encouragement, "It's okay, just breathe, you're gonna be okay." It wasn't okay, Matt couldn't breathe, he wasn't going to be okay.

Foggy couldn't have thought of anything more terrifying than holding Matt on the kitchen floor earlier, waiting for him to die, but in the living room, on their shitty futon, was so much fucking worse. They slept here, laughed here. Ate and drank and tried to make sense of the world. This wasn't where Matt was supposed to die, it was where he was supposed to heal, to drool on the bedding and snore in Foggy's fucking ear until he could get up and grin and sing and run around and drive everyone batshit crazy with his silly fucking feral bullshit.

"Matt, please, you need to breathe, you need to listen to me, _listen!"_

He was trying, blinking hard and turning his face in Foggy's direction, but the cough wouldn't go away, it wouldn't stop, and his cheeks were soaked with tears and expression wild with terror, pale, lips going blue. It was scarier than the roar in the tunnel, the click-snap of teeth in Foggy's ear, all the blood that Matt could draw.

"Cough it out, buddy, you need to get it out of you, come on," Foggy said, both of his hands on Matt's chest now, him hunkered over his friend like his friend had done to him in the tunnels, a shield for things that they couldn't save themselves from. "You can't breathe if you don't get it out, you need to get it out, you need—need—"

Matt twitched and shuddered and finally, goddamn, _finally_ he hacked something up, black and red and sticky all over the mattress but Foggy didn't fucking care, _God_ , he'd sleep on the fucking kitchen floor, he'd cut off his other leg if it meant he got to keep Matt for just one more day, one more hour.

"Good, good, Matty, good, keep doing that, okay?" He kept his hands on Matt's chest as if he could draw the black shit out himself. "Come on, buddy, come on. You stay with me, now. You're not going anywhere, you understand that?" 

Matt was half-gone, barely conscious, eyelids flickering as he took a few grating gasps of air, skin white like bone, shivering, his dizziness shoving him back and forth while Foggy held on and fought to be the counterbalance. It was like he'd picked up his own death in that kitchen and brought it back with the water, let the pressure sit on his chest and crush the life out of him.

It was that coughing fit that did it, flicked a switch in him and dragged him down into the dark. He shouldn't have gone to the kitchen. Such a small distance, but it had left him further away than ever, hovering at death's door and wondering whether or not to ring the bell.

Foggy didn't even realize how hard he was crying, how rough his sobbing had become until he swallowed and felt the rawness in his throat, the congestion in his sinuses. He couldn't get himself to stop, and he thought he'd never felt this lost before, this hopeless. Even after the fire when the world had burnt down, there was still something to hold onto, because Matt was there.

Now Matt was on his way out of Foggy's life, and everything else would go with him. Foggy couldn't pick himself up alone. He wasn't strong enough. He'd never been strong enough because it'd always been Matt who would get him moving, keep him talking, who'd nip at his heels and be the only thing that kept him around in the first fucking place.

Matt shivered, blinked slowly, tried to tuck his legs up for warmth. Pain threw his expression down as he shifted his broken ribs, and he pushed his face hard into the mattress with a near-inaudible moan. The coughing, with those ribs—it'd feel like getting stabbed, and Matt certainly knew what that felt like, thanks to Karen.

Foggy sniffed and thought, _Fuck Karen_ , and at the same time, _I'd do anything to have her back right now._

He'd spent so long believing that Matt would die before he did, preparing himself for it. Before now, he hadn't thought he'd be alone afterward. He thought that Karen, at least, would be there, even if the rest of Foggy's world burnt down around him. That he'd have somewhere to go even if it wasn't home.

He moved forward to gather the blankets, to do something other than stare and sob, but his leg shifted against the mattress; in rage at being jostled, it howled, deafening, in his ear, or his voice did, and he had to grapple at the torn muscles as if he could physically wall off the pain with his own fingers. Matt whined, weak and confused, and the sound cut through the haze of pain like the beam of a lighthouse through a storm.

Why couldn't it stop? Why couldn't he just have a little time, just a little, to gather himself, to take a fucking breath? He sat very still, waiting for the tug-of-war between his leg and Matt to finish and for a goddamned winner to be declared. He knew which one would win anyway. It always won.

Matt by a landslide.

"I know." He would never know. The sobbing started again before he could notice he'd stopped. "I'm right here."

Matt swallowed and tried to speak, only managing a weak 'F' before he coughed, retched again, scrabbled his fingers at his own throat. More phlegm, more plaintive whimpering, and not enough breathing. He reached out with his good hand for something to hold onto and Foggy took it like it was the most fragile thing on the planet, held it in both his own. His skin was ice.

It didn't take as long for this coughing fit to stop, and Foggy couldn't tell whether or not it was a good sign. Matt lay struggling for breath afterward, but Foggy kept holding his hand, afraid if he'd let go of it, he'd lose it all. His cold fingers tightened against Foggy's palm, an attempt to pull him closer, to burrow in warmth until the pain went away and he wouldn't have to suffer anymore.

"I'm here." His voice cracked. "I'm here." He moved closer, knowing what Matt wanted. He couldn't see, so Foggy made sure he could feel, carefully sidling up and settling Matt's head on his thigh. His leg shouted; he grit his teeth around his words to silence it. "I'm here. Don't try to talk, okay? Try to rest."

Matt managed a short word, "Cold," and Foggy gathered the blankets and tugged them around him, but they were still damp and the mattress wasn't much better, and Matt shivered and shivered until Foggy lost him to semi-consciousness, rattling and unresponsive. As he lay there panting, the fever flush across his skin, eyes half-open and fixed and cloudy, Foggy kept holding one of Matt's hands while rubbing his chest and whispering English and Punjabi and nonsense, anything to keep him anchored on this side of life.

A few times, Matt pushed out a long, choppy, awful sigh, and each time Foggy thought it could be a death rattle, Matt's last scoff at the world that had done this to him.

But Matt kept breathing, even though his chest shook and the mucus got stuck in his throat and spasms of pain passed across his face. His body stayed as stubborn as the man trapped inside it. He started dragging in each and every breath with his teeth bared, protective and greedy, challenging death to come closer and take them from him.

He'd never been this sick. Not even the virus had grounded him down, yanked him under so badly. Foggy swallowed, tried to get the dryness from his mouth, but the longer he stared at Matt, the more clear the truth became: yesterday had only been a stop-gap. It hadn't worked. Despite giving Matt the few drugs they had, and cleaning out his wounds, after all that—

Nothing was going to change. Matt was still going to die.

Again. A second death for a man that didn't even deserve the first one and wasn't at fault for either of them. No, that'd be the idiot he'd stapled himself to, the idealistic piece of shit that needed to be saved so often that Matt no longer had the ability to save himself.

Time passed them by. Matt slid downhill a little more and a little more. Foggy stared and watched and kept trying to talk to him but it was like he was already holding a dead body, that Matt had already gone and this was just another corpse like the skeletons out in the city, but Foggy held on, he wouldn't let go, he couldn't. Matt slowly got weaker, drowsing and silent, and stopped responding to Foggy's voice and touch. The fever took him and held him down and he couldn't shake it off, not this time.

And all Foggy could think to do was follow him, as he always had and always would.

The only thing he could hear anymore was the rattle of Matt's infection, all he could feel was the tightening burn of his own. The pain moved in and out and in and out and in and in until he had to take the ketamine again, balancing the dosage carefully, enough to dull the pain but keeping the rest of the world in tilt-shift focus. He didn't know what he'd do when he ran out; he left the vial sitting next to the pistol and kept his gaze and mind off of the latter.

It was hard to know how much time was passing. The ketamine kept wearing off, and Matt kept darting back and forth from unconsciousness to dull blinking, and everything else was a thick grey fog that he couldn't navigate. He didn't want to move, so he pissed in an empty water bottle. The bathroom might as well have been in Jersey. The smell of waste and death and infection was horrible, almost solid, choking his nose and mouth.

He knew it was nighttime when he was tugged out of the haze of the ketamine by a song in the dark—a distant wail and an echoing chorus of warbling, metallic noises. Clicking, like a baseball card on a bike's wheel. He'd done that as a kid. He remembered arduously climbing the gentle slope two streets over from his house to feel the excitement of the slight increase of speed when he coasted back down the hill.

It was sort of like that now, he thought. Air rushing by when he was really going nowhere.

Morning came. He knew because it was silent outside. It was a surprise, not being dead. Even more that Matt was still breathing.

All day, tried to wake Matt up, but Matt pawed at him and burrowed in the blankets and refused to budge. He tried to get Matt to drink, but he wasn't interested. With every inconsistent moment that passed, the more anxiety that uncurled from Foggy's gut to slither its way slowly up his chest and to his heart until _he_ couldn't breathe, either. Foggy couldn't even figure out which of them was suffering the most.

"You aren't supposed to die," he said in what he hoped was the afternoon, leaning in close so Matt could hear him, even though Matt could always hear him until now. "You aren't supposed to die here," he repeated, but Matt wouldn't respond, no matter what words he said.

After a while, Foggy blinked the tears out of his eyes and did what he was best at, the most useful skill he'd ever picked up off of his friend: he fucking tried anyway. He had nothing to lose but their lives, and even that prize was worthless and tired and unwanted.

Digging through the medical supplies, he found the turkey baster sitting at the bottom, and, backed into a corner with no other options, used it to force the water into Matt's system. At first, Matt fought, grappling blindly at the baster and Foggy's hand to get it to stop. He whined and tried to thrash away, but he ran out of energy after a few minutes, just as Foggy knew he would.

So Matt drank, one lazy drop after the other, for the first time that day. Foggy watched his friend's pale, rain-burned face as his eyes fluttered around, glazed and empty and confused and making no effort to figure out what was going on. He kept one hand gently massaging Matt's throat to help him swallow while keeping his other hand on the back of Matt's neck, guiding his movements so he didn't choke. He could feel Matt's pulse under his thumb. Around a hundred-twenty, but he ran high, he always had, ever since that first dusty plateau in the Kitchen. High heart-rate, low temperature. Foggy wondered if he was the only person who had the courage to know those things.

Two greedy basters of water went in and Matt kept it down, rolling his tongue around in his mouth as if to rout out any drops he might have missed. He appeared closer to consciousness than not; Foggy pushed his fingers through his hair and felt the grime of dried rain catch up against his knuckles. Matt pressed against him for more contact and Foggy spoke under his breath to hide the break of his voice.

"Buddy...can you hear me?"

To Matt's credit, he tried to make a noise, but it got trapped behind the phlegm in his throat and he ended up communicating with only a cough, deep and loud and awful. His face twisted with pain again, but even that reflex seemed to be weakening. He got something out of his lungs, that time, and Foggy hurried to wipe it away with the edge of his sleeve.

A chunky black slime. Red tinge. Darker than anything else he'd horked up till then. It smelled like the river. It smelled like death. Matt dying from the inside out. If there had been anything in Foggy's stomach, he would have thrown it up right there. He swallowed and forced out a hum instead, and it took the shape of a melody before he could stop it.

Matt responded: he wheezed, coughed, whimpered weak and soft. Foggy kept his fingers in his hair, so he would know that he wasn't alone. It helped, or at least seemed to; Matt kept turning his face toward Foggy's hand, eyes sliding around as he tried to focus on the fractured hum. Delta Dawn. Even delirious and dying, he still chased the warmth and comfort and all those things most familiar.

"Matty, can you hear me?"

A stuttering twitch made its way across Matt's face. He swallowed and tried to say something, and it wasn't much more than an uneven, dry mumble, but it was a noise, a sound, it meant that Matt could hear him and was trying to answer, that he hadn't yet crossed the murky line between recovery and death, hadn't began a tailspin into the dark.

Foggy could only guess as to what Matt was trying to tell him, but he knew Matt more than he knew himself. He knew what every little facial expression and low noise meant.

 _Foggy, it hurts_.

"I know it does, Matty."

A faint whimper. _I'm scared._

"I'm here with you. Till the end, Matt. I'm not going anywhere."

He fumbled at his chest with his good hand, then clawed at his own throat. _I can't breathe._

"Just keep trying, buddy, all you need to do for me now is try, okay?"

Matt's fingers dug against Foggy's leg again as he hawked up more mucus, his body seizing up as if it were putting every ounce of itself into getting that black shit out of it. The smell permeated everything, somehow worse than the Hudson itself, worse than the sick-sweet infection in the bus. Foggy started clearing the mess away with a rag, so they wouldn't have to lie down in it.

The sandpaper grated against his ears and Matt's weak little whine dug into his chest, all the way down where it burned the brightest. Matt tried to say something; the syllables were nonsense but everything else clear as day. He hurt, he was dizzy, he was weak. He was hungry, he was thirsty. He was scared, he was sad.

None of those came with specifics, but it didn't matter. Foggy hesitated before he started digging through the duffel bag, terrified that Matt would die in the scattered few moments that he was turned away, just like Deborah and her broken spine.

There was a word trying to come out and Foggy knew it was his name.

"I know, Matt. I know." What a fucking lie. He couldn't figure out what to do. What could he possibly do besides feed Matt more pills and pray to nothing that it would help? Matt couldn't give up, not for this, not after everything else, and Foggy couldn't, either. His leg didn't matter because if Matt died, he would follow, and nothing would matter after that. Not even Karen.

Foggy took the antibiotics, a double dosage, and opened the capsules, mixing the powder in with the water. There were only a few painkillers left, so he broke one of them in half and crushed it up with the Midol in between a folded Post-It, wondering why the noise he made when he smashed them was so familiar.

Picking up the last bottle of water, he poured some of it into the bottle he hadn't pissed in, then dumped the meds in with it. What he created was a grey mixture that stayed gritty no matter how hard he shook the bottle.

He grabbed the turkey baster again. "Could you drink this for me, Matty?"

Matt's answer was a high-pitched wheeze, and a strengthless attempt to move, although Foggy wasn't sure where. It was so strange to see him so lifeless, after the past few months, but the plateau had become a canyon and Matt was toeing the edge of the abyss without a safety net to catch him. Not this time.

Foggy's eyes hurt. Everything hurt. "I know, buddy. I just need you to drink this. It'll be just like before, you remember?" He got one hand at the base of Matt's neck again, feeling the sweat-slicked warmth of his skin. Matt didn't fight and it made Foggy's stomach turn. "Don't inhale, all right?"

The first drop made Matt's face twist momentarily in revulsion at the taste, which was heartening—being aware enough to taste something had to mean he wasn't in a fucking coma. Disgust was better than being dead. Foggy was patient, and gave him a drop at a time, and God, it must have taken at least an hour, but it all went down and stayed down.

Matt laid there afterward, breathing hard against Foggy's leg, and eventually he closed his eyes and fell asleep, exhausted by the mere act of drinking. His panting got harsher the longer he laid down, until Foggy had to tug him up from the futon and sit upright to breathe easier.

"Come on. Sit up. You can't breathe like that."

Matt made a grumble in the back of his throat, clearly annoyed. Annoyed was better than dead. He coughed once, holding his side, and pressed his head into the futon's backrest. It wasn't enough to keep him upright, and he slowly slid to his left until he was leaning against Foggy's side, trembling and panting. He weighed so little.

With Matt's left pressed to his right, the pressure on his leg increased, and he had to lean away to escape having to hold Matt up with his ruined limb.

"No, not against me," he grunted, picking Matt back up. Damn futon didn't have an armrest, so there was no corner to wedge Matt into. Foggy glanced around the room—it was still so dark, but he could see the basics, the walls and the doorways. Maybe if...if he pushed the futon against the wall? "Don't move, Matty. I'm gonna..."

Matt wasn't conscious, eyes half-shut and fixed, so Foggy didn't bother to finish his sentence. He scooted to over and let Matt lay down on his uninjured side. The gasping got harsher, more of a struggle, and Matt clawed at the mattress uselessly, like he could drag himself out of everything, the filthy apartment, the pain, and the fluid filling his chest.

"I know. I'll go as fast as I can," Foggy breathed, before settling his intact foot on the carpet. Something cold and wet squelched between his skin and the carpet, but he braced his right knee on the mattress and started pushing off with his left leg, shoving the futon a few inches toward the wall. The gap between the two only seemed to get bigger.

"Fff'g," Matt attempted, Foggy's name tainted with gurgling infection. He was more conscious than not, but that wouldn't last very long. "F'g."

"Sit up," Foggy said, moving to pull him off the mattress again. "You can't breathe unless you sit up." He tried his best to put Matt in a correct position, a comfortable one, letting him lean half-over his legs with his hands flat on the mattress to hold himself up, but there was no strength in Matt's body and Foggy was no better off.

They managed a barely-conscious balancing act, Matt wavering back and forth like a drunk with his fingernails digging into the mattress. Foggy sighed. "That's perfect. Just...stay like that, okay?"

Matt grumbled weakly, but the gasping got quieter, revealing the soft whine hidden beneath it. Low and ceaseless. Matt probably didn't even realize he was doing it. He panted, teeth bared, tears spilling from his eyes, his face twisted with pain and anger—anger at what, Foggy couldn't tell.

He left Matt where he was and started pushing the futon again. His leg was a lit flare, shrieking and crackling, slowly burning itself out from his knee to his hip. Foggy could only bite the inside of his cheek and keep going, shoving the futon across the carpet a half-inch at a time. It felt like an hour before the futon finally hit the wall. By then, Matt was laying down again, unable to keep himself upright.

"Okay, okay, I got it," Foggy said, again picking Matt up, guiding him to the corner so he could lean against the wall instead of himself. "There. That's good. Just breathe."

Foggy sat and waited to see if Matt would go down, but the corner seemed to be working. Matt had his head leaning against the wall, his breathing marginally easier, but his eyes half-shut again—not conscious. His light kept going in and out, in and out, a random pattern that Foggy couldn't predict.

The coffee table was way harder to move. Foggy tried reaching out and grabbing it from the futon, but it was too heavy, so he ended up sitting on the floor and dragging it over. That cold slick shit on the carpet crept into the fabric of his pants. Vomit or whatever Matt was coughing up. It smelled horrible.

It shouldn't have felt like such a huge victory, getting the table lined back up with the futon, but it did. Foggy's face tried to smile but it felt more like a grimace as he crawled back onto the mattress, keeping the remains of his leg away from the floor. Such a strange feeling, having it gone. A lot like how he felt when Matt left him, ages ago in the Kitchen.

Seeing Matt leaning against the wall, struggling for air, in the half-dark that the lamp left them in, made Foggy want to throw up again. It wasn't supposed to be this way. He wasn't supposed to dig life out from the rotten corners of the world and try to make it tangible. Matt wasn't supposed to die like this, from a fucking _cough_. How could Matt die of pneumonia when he'd lived through the virus?

His leg was shrieking and burning, the skin all the way up to his torso too hot and too tight. "Matt," he started, and couldn't finish it, because he didn't even know what he was going to say in the first place. He remembered saying, _He's dying, Karen_ , and knew Matt had been listening, and he'd known that Foggy wasn't lying about it.

Foggy wished he hadn't said anything. He'd been so angry, but now, looking at Matt, the only thing his mind could come up with was worry, fear. His leg throbbed, burned like a hot iron. Matt panted against the wall. It felt like everything was locking together, permanently, unable to be taken apart again. The seconds lodged into minutes and the minutes into hours and he knew—he knew that this was the end of it all. Just like how they'd started. Together and alone in a rotting apartment.

He opened his mouth. "I'm—I'm sorry this happened, Matt," he said, and he didn't get a response, and suddenly he couldn't stop the tears from coming into his eyes and down his burnt face. "I never wanted...I didn't want this to..." he trailed off, and couldn't say what he wanted to say even though nobody was listening. He couldn't even _think_ the words, let alone speak them.

He had to say it. Matt might die right here, right now, and he'd never know that none of this was his fault. Foggy blinked hard, sniffed, wiped his aching face. He crept closer, until they were side-by-side, then reached out and touched Matt's arm, then a handful of his shirt. Foggy pulled himself close, resting his forehead on Matt's shoulder.

With a soft whine, Matt shifted, and his good hand made its way up, covering Foggy's with his own. His skin was cold and he wouldn't stop shaking, but it meant he was aware. It made everything so much worse, but so much easier.

"Matt, I'm—" a sob came out of him, suddenly, cutting off his words. It was such a twisted, awful noise. Foggy didn't want to believe it was from him. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to..." no, that was a lie, a horrible one, "...I wanted..." he didn't even know what he wanted, and that was a lie, too, he knew what he wanted, what he needed, all he had to do was _say it_ , "...I'm sorry I made Karen leave."

Matt slurred something that started with an 'M'. Foggy didn't know what it was.

"I never wanted it to end like this. I never...I never thought it would." Before he could hold himself back, he was speaking again, rambling, the words tumbling out as if he were spitting them up out of the fire that was his leg. "I'm sorry. I'm—I'm sorry that—I made Karen l-leave." He started sobbing again, unaware that he'd stopped. "I should have—she should have stay—I should have—Matt, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's my fault. I'm sorry."

The hand resting over Foggy's went limp and weak. He grabbed it, held onto it, and stared at Matt's chest, waiting to see if it stopped moving. Still breathing, in and out, sharp gasps and whining half-sighs. Not dead.

"I'm scared. I'm—" he remembered the words, he'd heard them before, and déjà vu struck him hard and cold, "—so fucking scared."

No response. Foggy leaned his head on Matt's shoulder again. Not dead, but no response. Even when his leg wasn't touching anything but the bandages wrapped at the end, it pounded, tried to overtake his thoughts and focus and turn them all toward the pain until it stopped.

"It hurts so much, Matty," he said, hearing the way his voice wavered and cracked and sank. "I can't. I can't do this anymore." Watching Matt die, watching himself die. He wasn't sure which was worse. They'd come so far, only to be stopped at death's front door.

Foggy buried his face in Matt's neck and cried, harder than he had when the sky opened, harder than when the bite had come in and destroyed their lives, harder than he had when Matt died in his sleep and burned their home in effigy. He didn't want to die. He couldn't die.

His leg throbbed and burned and whispered otherwise.

The pain slowly took over. He stopped trying to talk and went for the vial again, listening to Matt's breathing as he unwrapped a syringe and got the needle in. For a long few minutes, he stared at the drug, at the half-dose in the syringe, and thought for a long time about filling the whole thing and putting it in his arm. Falling asleep and never waking up. It would be so easy and so painless. It might even feel _good._

Foggy swallowed, let out a shuddering breath, and filled the syringe completely. Four doses. The pain pounded against the inside of his head like a caged animal trying to get loose. He stared at the syringe, stared and stared while his hands shook and shook, staring at the door, the last one he'd ever have to pry open.

Matt shifted, whined. Coughed a few times, hacked something up. Tried to say something but couldn't get the words out. His breath rattled for a minute, then he forced out a faint, nearly-silent, "Fog," and Foggy jolted, looked up and over, and saw his friend in the corner, cold and alone.

The door stayed shut. Foggy pushed the contents of the syringe back in, took out the half-dose, and put it in the muscle of his thigh. He tossed everything back onto the table and worked his way back over to the other side of the futon. The pain didn't seem so bad when he looked at Matt's.

"I'm here, bud," he mumbled, dragging the blankets over. He curled up against Matt's side, for once glad of the tremor. Feeling it vibrating meant Matt wasn't dead. Foggy leaned against it, ignoring the movement spilling over, no matter how nauseated it would make him, and tugged the blankets around them both.

Matt let out a soft breath that Foggy could swear was filled with relief. He tried to get closer, but couldn't build up the strength, so Foggy did it for him, leaning against his uninjured side and keeping an arm draped gently across his shoulders. Matt's head tilted to the left and leaned against Foggy's temple.

The drugs carried him out to sea, and he fell asleep with the ripple of Matt's tremor bearing him along. His last thought was quiet, a scared question of whether or not he'd wake up and find Matt dead, stiff and cold, and whether or not he'd take the pistol and follow him.

\---

Every time he woke in the smeared glaze of the ketamine, the tremor was still there. Every time, he found himself crying, pulling Matt closer, praying deliriously that nothing came and wrenched his friend out of his grip. Every time, Matt shifted, made a soft noise, and that was enough for Foggy to close his eyes and let the ketamine tug him under again.

\---

Foggy had no idea what time it was when the ketamine wore off. The vinegar lamp was so dim that it might have been dead, and he was just hallucinating the light. His whole right side felt like it had a fever. The left was cold, shivering. Matt rattled from somewhere on his right side.

It took him a while to realize that he was laying down on his back, his head pillowed on Matt's leg, the tremor shaking him apart and keeping him together. As long as the tremor was still there, Foggy would be, too.

He tried to sit up, but vertigo smacked him right in the jaw and he ended up face-down in Matt's leg, not quite sure how he'd gotten there. He opened his mouth to ask for help but nothing came out. There was something about it that should have been worrying him, but he couldn't figure out why.

Everything was too warm. When he lifted his head, he could feel the dampness he left behind on Matt's leg. Too many blankets? Where the hell was he?

Foggy rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, or what he assumed was a ceiling, because it was too dark to really see anything else. His thoughts wandered as he tried to pick up the pieces, to figure out what had happened.

It took a long couple of minutes before it came together. He'd fallen asleep on Matt's leg, woken up on Matt's leg. His own was burning with pain, and a coldness washed over him when he finally put together the fact, the reminder that he'd actually _lost_ the leg, he'd broken it in a tunnel and then it had gotten infected and then Karen had taken it, taken it and thrown it away and then Foggy threw _her_ away and—

He dragged in a breath that skipped across his mouth as a sob. The volume of it startled him, like he'd never heard a noise so loud before. Matt didn't move at all, except for the tremor. Foggy wanted to apologize more, for the leg and for everything, but there was nobody to apologize to, he remembered that now. It was his fault.

Foggy didn't even try to get another dose of ketamine. He lay there, the pain chewing on his knee and his hip and his head, and finally realized what it felt like to be fucking Catholic. Maybe in another life, he could laugh about it.

Not in this one. Not anymore. It was infected, his leg. It had to be, otherwise he wouldn't be spiking a fever and pissing sweat everywhere. His thoughts would be in a straight line instead of a jumbled-up tangle of memories.

He did know one thing: that there wasn't much time left. If he was feverish, it wouldn't be much longer before the infection hit his brain, and that'd be it. Foggy wanted to be afraid. He wanted to be scared to open the door, but he couldn't muster up the energy for it. All he could think was _finally, finally, finally._

Foggy turned his head to the side, shutting his eyes at the returning twist of vertigo before laying still and waiting for it and the nausea to pass. The tremor was still there, and it probably wasn't helping, but he was glad to feel it, to know he wasn't yet stuck on a futon with Matt's corpse.

Matt. _Matt._ He was so important, Foggy knew that. In more than one way, not just to the person dying in his lap.

His mind started racing faster. There was still something he had to do. Matt was different, so different, and someone needed to know. Someone had to be told that the virus inside Matt was different than the one that had killed almost everyone. Foggy had nobody to tell any more, but...but maybe there was still a way to get the information out.

The notebook. He'd written everything down in there for a reason. He still had it. There was no way to take it anywhere, but if they ever found him or Matt, they could—they could find the notebook.

Compelled to move for the first time in hours, Foggy rolled onto his side, facing the coffee table, and waited for the dizziness to pass before reaching out to it. His hand staggered along the chipped wood until it found the rough fabric of the duffel bag. He started digging around inside until his fingertips rubbed against paper, its smoothness feeling so out of place among the heat and rough agony of everything else.

His fingers were clumsy. He dragged the notebook across the table and knocked it and the pistol to the floor. Leaning down to fish it back up, he ignored the gun, trying to focus on what he was going to write. In that short moment, he realized he was no longer touching Matt, and fumbled to find him again. Still shivering, still alive. Foggy didn't even know why he kept checking. It wasn't going to matter for much longer.

He dragged the notebook over, let it lay along Matt's steady leg as he worked the pen loose from the metal spiral. Trying to write, to come up with words, his hand shook across the page like Matt's would. The words were uneven, difficult to read as the pen's ink started failing, blanking out whenever he drew an upward line.

"You stupid fuck," he said, hearing his own slur. "Please."

Matt rattled against the wall.

\--- ~~~~

_~~karen~~_

                                                                              _ ~~to whe~~_

_~~KAREN~~_

_~~to whoemever finds us~~_

\---

That was all he wrote before his leg took his attention again. Burning and itching, a sharp prickle of pain and heat like the foot he'd lost was standing on hot coal. Foggy groaned, but down on his tongue until he tasted blood. No. He had to write this.

His hand wouldn't stop shaking. Both hands. At least he wasn't feral.

\---

_TO WHOMEVER FINDS THIS_

_my name is ~~FOG~~ FRANKLIN NELSON my leg is infected i am near_

_death and ~~I don't know~~ nothing is going to change that ~~but if you~~_

\---

If what? Foggy blinked tears out of his eyes, forced them across his skin with the back of his hand. He was totally stretched out across Matt now, the tremor against his chest and Matt not moving. Foggy didn't want to look up. He knew what he'd see.

What if Matt got better? It was a ridiculous thought, but what would Matt even do? Would he stay until he died, too, like Foggy would? Would he join another pack, somewhere he belonged? There were too many questions, and Foggy couldn't stop and wonder the answer to any of them.

He pushed out a breath and started writing again.

\---

_if he is still with me the other mans name is MATT he is ~~feral~~_

_INFECTED ~~and I~~ AND HE DID NOT DIE FROM THE VIRUS he caught_

_pneumona and died ~~here with~~ AND he DID NOT DESERVE IT_

\---

Matt would never deserve all that had been done to him, nor would Karen. Foggy knew he hadn't deserved it, either, no matter how much he thought he did.

\---

_~~please if you value~~_

_~~if~~_

_~~for the lo~~_

_please IF IT IS POSSIBLE please FIND SOMEONE_

_who has medical ~~knowledge~~ experience AND BRING_

_THEM MATT'S BODY. he did NOT DIE from the VIRUS_

_he was sick with pneumona THE VIRUS DID NOT KILL_

_HIM. he has been infected for almost two years i have kept_

_track of it in the first ~~three~~ four pages of this notebook_

_PLEASE KEEP IT WITH HIS BODY_

\---

Foggy could barely read it, because it was too dark and his handwriting was shit. The words weren't even between the lines, just scrawled across the page. Didn't fucking matter.

He didn't know what else to say, but he started writing again anyway.

\---

_I ~~T IS FOR OUR~~_

_if ANYTHING can be ~~done~~ created to counter act_

_the virus IT IS WITH MATT._

_if nothing can be learned from him PLEASE BURY HIM_

_HE DID NOT DESERVE THIS_

\---

For some reason, that was the most important thing Foggy could write. He wished he could write it a dozen times, tattoo it on his skin. Any way to make it more clear, more obvious.

He shivered as a chill went through him, and tried to get closer to Matt. Strange how he was trying to use him for body heat. Even stranger that it almost felt like it was working.

Foggy dozed, woke up, dozed again.

Woke up and wrote.

\---

_god all mighty help me_

\---

It was all he could think of.

Maybe if he believed in God, things would have been easier. Maybe he wouldn't be so afraid. All he'd had to believe in was Matt and himself.

It didn't matter. His mind swam and he struggled to stay awake.

Matt twitched underneath him, and he tried to climb off of him, but his body wasn't working correctly. The leg wasn't just flaring when he moved it, now it was a constant pressure. He clutched the pen and notebook, re-reading his words but unable to make sense of them.

On the fifth try, he fell asleep again, or fell into something. It was hot and murky and he knew it was probably the welcome mat. Did Death have a welcome mat? It had a door, didn't it?

He felt his lips move and heard his voice saying something about a doorbell, and was glad nobody heard him. He clung to the sensation of the tremor, rolling weakly against his chest and stomach, still there, still there. If Matt was alive, Foggy was alive, too. Matt had to be alive. He had to be.

\---

_~~i'm sorry~~_

_~~i'm sorry i~~_

_~~i'm sorry~~_

\---

At some point, he was pretty sure he'd taken another dosage of ketamine, but he couldn't be sure. He didn't know what day it was, what time it was. It was just a smear, like his life after the tunnel, and all of it was starting to meld together into one big pile of bullshit. He wanted it to stop but he was too scared to stop it himself.

What if Karen came back? What if he actually survived? What if Matt did?

His life was a long series of _What-if_ s. It made sense that they'd lasted all the way till the end.

\--- ~~~~

_~~karen~~_

\---

Foggy dropped the notebook and couldn't remember what he wrote. He threw the pen down to the floor next to it because if he couldn't remember it, it didn't matter. Matt trembled and gasped next to him. God, how was he still alive? It might have been days already. It might have been hours. Foggy couldn't tell. He gave up trying to figure it out.

\---

He was cold when he woke again, even though he was wrapped in the blankets. Still laying across Matt's legs. Matt's shaking hand was resting on Foggy's shoulder, the other tucked against his side, still trying to shield his broken ribs.

Foggy rolled over and Matt's hand dropped limply against his chest. He grabbed it and held it, noticing the swelling around the ring finger where it had been broken before the storm hit and tore their lives apart. It was strange seeing it—physical evidence that they'd had a life before this hazy hallway they'd been forced to navigate.

His brain was telling him to tape the ring finger against the middle finger, so Matt would heal correctly. Reflex. Matt's finger wasn't supposed to be broken, but it was. Foggy's leg wasn't supposed to be gone, but it was, too.

He sighed, and let Matt's hand rest on his chest, settling his own on top of it. There were still scrapes on the back of Foggy's hand, where Matt had dug his nails in, trying to shield his hearing from the roar of the thunderstorm. Another strange thing. A tie to a world Foggy thought they'd lost. It was still there. He just couldn't reach it.

"Sorry, Matty," he whispered, mouth dry and throat parched. "M'sorry."

It was quiet. Foggy thought he saw something in his peripheral vision, but no, he was hallucinating, he had to be. Delirium from his fever, fever from his infection. He turned his head and it was gone.

Was it gone? No, there was something. It was dark. He couldn't see. Blind, like Matt.

Had he heard noises? Was that what had woken him up? Fuck, he couldn't remember. He couldn't even remember waking up. Foggy lifted his head, blinking hard, trying to think clearly. It was impossible. He was stuck in an overheated mire that was slowly freezing all around him. Vertigo tried to make him lie down but he fought it, clinging to Matt, forcing himself upright.

There was definitely someone there. God, of course he was hallucinating. It was probably his goddamn sister or something. His dad coming to say how disappointed he was that Foggy hadn't opened a butcher shop, or his mom coming to tell him things he already knew. Or Matt, there to say he was sorry or that it was his fault or some other line of shit that wasn't true.

Foggy brought his intact leg up against his chest to stop from falling off the futon. He stared at the dark, trying to figure out what he was seeing. It didn't talk, but it moved forward, and in the dim reach of the light left in the vinegar lamp, he saw her—scarred face, skin burnt from the rain. Eyes bright and bloodshot and blue like the sky they didn't have anymore.

What a strange hallucination. He hadn't thought it would be Karen.

He waited for her to disappear, but instead her slender, steady hands picked up the vinegar lamp, taking it apart. Silently, she went about digging a battery from her backpack, replacing the old one, putting the lamp back together. Light exploded through the room, so bright that Foggy had to shield his eyes, like she'd brought in the sun and put it back in the bottle. Hallucinations didn't do that, did they?

It took a while for his eyes to adjust, and she didn't move in the meantime. Foggy slowly dropped his hand and stared. He couldn't put it together in his head. There was no way she was back. They didn't deserve her. She didn't need them.

But there she was, just standing there, hitching up her backpack, clear as anything. She was speaking a foreign language with her body that she didn't even realize she'd learned and Foggy didn't even realize he'd mastered; lines etched in her face that wrote _I'm sorry_ and the soft sigh from her chest that said _I can't believe you two are still alive_ and her hovering and fiddling with the strap of the backpack on her shoulder that asked, _Can I come back?_

It wasn't like any of them had anywhere else to go.

She gnawed on her bottom lip, then finally talked. "Uh," she said. "Hi."

"...Hi."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Now it's cold and we're scared, and we've both been shaken._  
>  _Hey, look at us, man, this doesn't need to be the end..._  
>  Rob Thomas
> 
> \---
> 
> next: last thing  
>  _But if some other force could burn away the darkness, I would welcome it, 'cause I am done waiting for the sun._

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by Vicks, backup by Scott and Kit. HTML help by [TeeJay.](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
> 
> I made a Tumblr for my work in this AU. You can find it [here.](http://sunshineverse.tumblr.com/)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The One Patch Problem](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4573065) by [tj_teejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
  * [Good Vibrations](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4777223) by [tj_teejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
  * [The Land of Milk and Honey](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4846418) by [tj_teejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
  * [When The Lights Go Down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4917997) by [MomentumDeferred](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MomentumDeferred/pseuds/MomentumDeferred), [tj_teejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
  * [Darkness Craves The Mind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5114429) by [MomentumDeferred](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MomentumDeferred/pseuds/MomentumDeferred), [tj_teejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
  * [Walk Me Through It](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5531582) by [tj_teejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
  * [Make It Home Again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5374751) by [MomentumDeferred](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MomentumDeferred/pseuds/MomentumDeferred), [tj_teejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
  * [Sunshine Audiobook](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5565409) by [confusedrambler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/confusedrambler/pseuds/confusedrambler)
  * [Feral Matt for Sunshine verse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5614876) by [Anneofnyc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anneofnyc/pseuds/Anneofnyc)
  * [The Two Pills Solution](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5755993) by [MomentumDeferred](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MomentumDeferred/pseuds/MomentumDeferred), [tj_teejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tj_teejay/pseuds/tj_teejay)
  * [On The Other Foot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7248262) by [BeautifulForMyLove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifulForMyLove/pseuds/BeautifulForMyLove)
  * [Never Let Go](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7383607) by [Beguile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beguile/pseuds/Beguile)
  * [Then, Then, Now](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11048787) by [Cerententia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerententia/pseuds/Cerententia)
  * [Ocean Dweller](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11058738) by [Cerententia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerententia/pseuds/Cerententia)
  * [Remains](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11374104) by [Cerententia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerententia/pseuds/Cerententia)




End file.
